The specific highest point on the planet Earth, measured by the standard elevation metric of height above mean sea level, is the summit of Mount Everest — the 8,848.86-metre-tall Himalayan peak on the Nepal-Tibet border, first successfully summited by the New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary and the Nepali Sherpa Tenzing Norgay on 29 May 1953, and universally understood since approximately the 19th century as the substantively highest single geographic feature on the planet. The specific highest point on the planet Earth, measured by the substantially different metric of distance from the geometric centre of the planet, is not the summit of Mount Everest. It is the summit of Mount Chimborazo — a 6,263-metre-tall inactive stratovolcano in the Cordillera Occidental range of the Ecuadorian Andes, located approximately one degree south of the equator, approximately 150 kilometres south-southwest of Quito, and approximately 2,585 metres shorter than Everest by the standard sea-level elevation measure that essentially every atlas of the modern world uses to rank mountain heights. The summit of Chimborazo is, according to the most recent 2016 GPS survey data, approximately 6,384.4 kilometres from the centre of the Earth. The summit of Everest is approximately 6,382.3 kilometres from the centre of the Earth. Chimborazo is therefore approximately 2.1 kilometres (1.3 miles) closer to outer space than Everest is, despite being 2,585 metres shorter above sea level.
The specific reason a mountain can be shorter than another mountain by 2,585 metres and simultaneously closer to outer space by 2,100 metres is that the planet Earth is not, in fact, a sphere. It is an oblate spheroid — a specific geometric shape in which the equatorial diameter of the planet is measurably larger than the polar diameter, produced by the specific centrifugal forces generated by the planet’s approximately 24-hour rotation about its polar axis. The centrifugal effect is substantially strongest at the equator (where the specific rotational velocity of the planet’s surface reaches approximately 1,670 kilometres per hour) and progressively weakens toward the poles (where the rotational velocity approaches zero). Across the approximately 4.5 billion years of Earth’s rotational history, the accumulated centrifugal effect has produced a specific measurable bulging of the planet’s equatorial region relative to its polar regions. As detailed in the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service explanation of the specific reason Chimborazo (rather than Everest) is the point on Earth’s surface farthest from Earth’s centre, the specific magnitude of the equatorial bulge is approximately 21.3 kilometres — meaning that mean sea level at the equator is approximately 21.3 kilometres farther from the geometric centre of the planet than mean sea level is at the poles. A mountain located near the equator therefore starts, in essence, on a substantially higher “launchpad” than a mountain located at higher latitudes — and if the mountain is high enough (Chimborazo is 6,263 metres above local sea level) and the latitude is low enough (Chimborazo is 1 degree south of the equator), the specific summit elevation from the planet’s centre can exceed even Mount Everest’s substantially higher elevation above local sea level.
The specific discovery that the planet Earth was an oblate spheroid rather than a perfect sphere was itself, historically, the specific scientific consequence of an expedition that had attempted to measure Mount Chimborazo. As documented in the United States Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division’s institutional summary of the historical measurement of Chimborazo and the associated scientific discoveries, the French Academy of Sciences dispatched the specific “French Geodesic Mission” to Ecuador in 1735 under the joint leadership of the French geographers Louis Godin, Pierre Bouguer, and Charles Marie de La Condamine, with the specific objective of measuring the length of one degree of latitude at the equator to determine whether Sir Isaac Newton’s 1687 theoretical prediction that the Earth was flattened at the poles (rather than the competing Cassini family’s contemporary claim that the Earth was flattened at the equator) could be empirically verified. The Mission’s measurements — taken between 1735 and 1744 across the specific Ecuadorian latitude that includes Mount Chimborazo — confirmed Newton’s prediction. The Earth was, in fact, an oblate spheroid, with the equator substantially larger in circumference than the polar meridian. The specific 18th-century Ecuadorian mountain that would, approximately two and a half centuries later, be shown to be the specific point on Earth’s surface farthest from the planet’s centre was thus the specific geographic location at which the Earth’s specific tendency to have exactly that kind of “farthest point” had originally been scientifically established.
The mountaineering history
The specific attempts to climb Chimborazo across the subsequent two and a half centuries were, in substantial measure, driven by the specific 18th- and 19th-century European belief that Chimborazo was, in fact, the tallest mountain on Earth by any measure. As reported in Geology In’s summary of the specific historical understanding of Chimborazo’s status as the world’s highest mountain across the 18th and 19th centuries, the specific Everest summit elevation of 8,848 metres was not established until the completion of the Great Trigonometric Survey of British India in 1852, meaning that essentially every European geographer between 1745 and 1852 who addressed the question of which specific mountain was the tallest on Earth answered: Chimborazo. The Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who arrived in Ecuador in 1802 as part of his substantial 1799-1804 South American expedition, specifically attempted to summit Chimborazo on 23 June 1802 with his French colleague Aimé Bonpland and his Ecuadorian companion Carlos Montúfar, on the specific presumption that reaching the summit would constitute the highest human altitude attainment in the recorded history of European exploration. Humboldt’s party reached approximately 5,878 metres (19,286 feet) before being turned back by altitude sickness approximately 385 metres short of the actual summit. The specific altitude Humboldt’s party achieved on 23 June 1802 remained the highest recorded human elevation until 1831. The specific first recorded successful summit of Chimborazo occurred on 4 January 1880, when the British mountaineer Edward Whymper (who had previously become internationally famous for making the first ascent of the Swiss Matterhorn in 1865) reached the summit accompanied by the Italian guides Louis Carrel and Jean-Antoine Carrel — approximately 78 years after Humboldt’s failed attempt and approximately 27 years after Mount Everest had been definitively demonstrated to be a taller peak by the standard sea-level measurement.
What the ranking actually means
The specific comparative-measurement question that Chimborazo’s specific status as the “farthest point from Earth’s centre” raises is, in essence, a question about what specific human activity the specific ranking is trying to describe. As analysed in Impactful Travel’s specific summary of the substantive differences between Chimborazo’s various claims to specific geographic superlatives, the specific “highest mountain” concept can be quantified against at least three substantively different reference measurements: the elevation above mean sea level (which favours Mount Everest), the distance from the geometric centre of the Earth (which favours Mount Chimborazo, by approximately 2.1 kilometres), and the total vertical relief between the mountain’s structural base and its summit (which favours the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea, whose approximately 10,210-metre base-to-summit total is measured from the Pacific Ocean floor and substantially exceeds Everest’s approximately 4,650-metre base-to-summit measurement from the surrounding Tibetan Plateau). At least 26 other mountain summits — including Africa’s Kilimanjaro and several Andean peaks besides Chimborazo — are also farther from the Earth’s centre than Mount Everest is, purely as a consequence of their substantially lower latitudes and their locations on the specific equatorial bulge. The specific popular claim that Chimborazo is “closest to the sun” is substantially misleading — the Earth’s orbital distance from the Sun varies by approximately 5 million kilometres across the specific perihelion-aphelion annual cycle, meaning that the specific 2.1-kilometre elevation advantage Chimborazo holds over Everest is essentially trivial by comparison. What Chimborazo is, unambiguously and consistently, is the single point on the solid surface of the planet Earth that comes closest to being outside the planet itself. On any given day of any given year, the specific individual human being who is standing at exactly that specific geographic location is, essentially by definition, the specific person on the planet farthest from its centre.
The post The highest mountain on Earth is not the closest mountain to outer space — because the planet bulges outward at the equator, the summit of a volcano in Ecuador called Chimborazo sits farther from the center of the Earth than Mount Everest does, even though Everest is much taller appeared first on Space Daily.