Did You Know Mount Everest Is Not The Tallest Mountain On Earth?
Mount Everest gets a lot of press, since people (for some reason) enjoy risking their lives to scale her icy face.
It’s not, however, the tallest mountain available if you want to try to exist in too-thin air just so you can say you made it to the top.
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Mount Everest tops out at 20,029 feet above sea level, but if you measure the distance from the center of the earth, Ecuador’s Chimborazo is actually the “tallest.”
This is because of the elevated crust near the equator, which takes its height from 20,564 feet to 36,142.
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Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on the island of Hawaii, would be around 30,610 feet high if you removed all of the water around it. It is sitting on oceanic crust, which is denser and can support more weight than the continental crust.
Conversely, there are points deeper in the ocean than Everest is tall. The Challenger Deep measures 36,036 feet below the surface.
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Once you consider outer space, Everest seems the size of a molehill…but perhaps that’s better left for another day.
We’ve given you enough to think about for now!
