Location from The Expanse by James S.A. Corey
Jupiter's largest moon and the 'breadbasket of the outer planets.' Massive agricultural domes feed millions across the Belt. The protomolecule hybrid battle that started Caliban's War destroyed the mirrors that kept the crops alive.
Ganymede is the most important food production facility in the outer system, and that makes it the most strategically valuable real estate outside the inner planets. The agricultural domes produce enough food to supply Belt stations across Jupiter's orbit and beyond. Without Ganymede, the outer system starves. The battle of Ganymede was triggered when a protomolecule hybrid — one of Mao's weapons projects — was deployed on the surface, attacking both UN and MCRN forces. The fighting destroyed the orbital mirrors that provided sunlight to the agricultural domes, and without light, the crops died. Millions of refugees fled a station that could no longer feed itself. Prax came here looking for his daughter Mei, taken by Strickland for Mao's hybrid program. The search through Ganymede's collapsing infrastructure — airlocks failing, crops freezing, desperate people fighting over the last functioning shelters — is one of the series' most harrowing sequences. Ganymede showed that the protomolecule didn't just kill the people it touched. It killed everyone who depended on the systems it destroyed.
Ganymede's surface is ice and rock, but what matters are the agricultural domes — enormous transparent structures housing the hydroponic farms and soil beds that produce food for the outer system. Orbital mirrors focus sunlight onto the growing domes, a precise arrangement that took decades to calibrate. The station sections are functional and crowded, designed around food production rather than habitation. When the mirrors fell, the domes began to freeze — crops dying under dimming light while the station's population scrambled to evacuate.
Also known as: Ganymede, Ganymede Station