There are certain things in life that are universally known.
There are 8 planets in the solar system, the blue whale is the biggest animal that ever lived,
diamond is the hardest naturally occurring substance on earth,
and Mount Everest is the tallest mountain. But my dear viewer, that last fact is a total lie.
And if you think this video is just going to be about a certain Hawaiian volcano,
you’re only half right. What if I was to tell you there are in fact two mountains other than
Everest that can quite reasonably claim to be the tallest on earth.
You see, despite the fact that every textbook, website, encyclopedia,
and natural history documentary you’ve ever seen has confidently told you that Mount Everest is
the tallest peak on the planet… I‘ve got some surprising news for you: it isn‘t.
In 1802, the East India Company launched one of the biggest cartographical projects
in history. Known as the Great Trigonometrical Survey, it aimed
to precisely map all four and a half million square kilometers of the Indian Subcontinent.
Over the course of almost 70 years, the Great Trigonometrical Survey
quite literally put India on the map, and one of its crowning achievements
was to determine the exact heights of many of the tallest mountains on Earth.
This was only 200 or so years ago - just a few generations back - but in those
days many of these most massive of mountains were completely unknown to western science.
It wasn‘t just that we weren‘t sure how tall they were - we didn’t even know they existed.
That made the Great Trigonometrical Survey a true journey of discovery, and as its cartographers,
explorers, and surveyors penetrated ever deeper into the remotest reaches of the Himalayas,
they met ever more monstrous mountains. As a result, the mountain considered to be
the tallest on earth changed on a fairly regular basis throughout the nineteenth
century as new peaks were discovered and accurately measured for the first time.
In the 300 years or so preceding the survey it had been widely accepted that Mount Chimborazo in
Ecuador was the tallest mountain in the world when measured against sea level. That changed in 1808
when the Survey discovered a Nepalese mountain called Dhaulagiri which wasn‘t just bigger than
Chimborazo, it was *much* bigger - almost 2 whole kilometres. Dhaulagiri was considered the tallest
mountain on earth until 1847, when Kangchenjunga was found to be a couple of hundred metres taller,
and Kangchenjunga passed the baton on to K2 when *it* was discovered in 1856. K2 only held the
record for a matter of months, because later that year Mount Everest - named after George Everest,
one-time head of the Great Trigonometrical Survey and Surveyor General of India - was
officially declared the tallest mountain in the world. It's held that title ever since.
But despite more than 160 years as the world's premier peak,
Mount Everest‘s hold on that 'lofty' record is surprisingly shaky.
The question is, if Everest isn‘t the true king of the mountains… what is?
Confusingly, there isn’t actually a simple
answer to that question - it all comes down to how you measure it.
And sure enough, if you were to hold up the world's longest tape measure against
every mountain on Earth you would indeed find that Mount Everest is the tallest.
But you just made the classic mountain-measuring mistake of standing on dry land.
Because the honour of highest hill actually belongs to Mauna Kea,
a dormant volcano that towers over Hawai'i, the largest of the Hawaiian islands. And Mauna
Kea doesn't pip Everest by a hair either- standing at a staggering 10,210 metres,
it's well over a kilometre taller. If you were to drop Britain‘s tallest mountain - Ben
Nevis - directly on top of Everest‘s snowy peak, Mauna Kea would *still* be bigger.
There is, however, a bit of a catch - more than half of the mighty mountain
Mauna Kea is submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean, leaving a little over 4,200 metres
above sea level - that's why Everest is officially considered the taller mountain.
And you may think that sounds perfectly reasonable... but is it *really.*
Standing at 8 feet 3 inches, Turkish farmer Sultan Kösen is the tallest
man alive today. If he was to, say, stand in a swimming pool for a bit,
would that change his height? Would the good people at Guinness give his record
to someone else? Obviously not. So why doesn't the same logic apply to mountains?
You could argue that a Turkish farmer going for a dip isn't quite the same as Mauna Kea
standing submerged in the Pacific Ocean ever since it formed about a million years ago,
and that's a fair point. But not even oceans are permanent.
Admittedly, climbing Mauna Kea is going to be a very different experience to scaling Mount Everest
(you're going to need access to a submarine for one thing). And in contrast to the rarified
air of Everest's upper slopes, the peak of Mauna Kea isn't even always covered in snow.
Perhaps that's the real reason Mount Everest is so widely accepted as the big daddy.
Mauna is clearly taller, but Everest pierces higher into the atmosphere.
When you reach its peak you are quite literally standing on top of the world,
the closest you can get to the stars with your feet on solid ground...
... except, that isn't actually true either.
We’ve already established that Everest isn‘t the tallest mountain on earth if
you measure from base to tip (and you should always measure base
to tip). But what if I was to tell you that you can climb even higher?
Unless you're Kyrie Irving, you probably picture Planet Earth as a giant sphere.
That's how it's always depicted, and that's how it appears when we see images of it from
space. But that isn't entirely accurate: in reality, our homeworld is an oblate spheroid.
To put that into normal person English, earth isn't spherical,
nor is it flat - it's *fat:* thanks to the combined effects of gravity and earth's spin,
like your waistline after Christmas dinner, our planet bulges around the middle.
On a planetary scale that bulge is absolutely tiny - if you were to shrink earth down to
the size of a beach ball, it would be about a millimetre wider when measured
around the equator rather than through the poles (that‘s why you can‘t detect
the bulge when you see images of earth from space). But on something the size of a planet,
even a minuscule deformation has a significant impact on a human scale.
Someone standing at the North Pole is about 20 kilometres closer to earth’s core than
someone standing on the equator. And the same, of course, is true for mountains.
Thanks to a boost from earth’s unsightly paunch,
the highest point on earth when measured from the centre of the planet isn't on top of Mount
Everest. It isn't even in the Himalayas - it's 10,000 miles away in Ecuador.
I mentioned at the start of this video that, for several hundred years,
Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador was thought to be the tallest mountain in the world when measured
against sea level. Mountaineers today flock to Mount Everest, but in the 17th and 18th
centuries it was Chimborazo that brought in crowds of climbers hoping to stand on top of the world.
In reality, western science had gotten this one quite spectacularly wrong - with
an elevation of just 6,263 metres, Chimborazo doesn’t even make the top
200 tallest mountains on earth - it’s only the 39th tallest in the Andes.
But in a genuinely incredible coincidence, thanks to its location just one degree south
of the equator, Chimborazo *is* the *highest* point on the planet. Its peak is a healthy
3,967 miles from earth‘s centre, a full 1.3 miles higher than the peak of Mount Everest,
despite being more than 2.5 kilometres shorter when measured against sea level. So in the end
all those 17th and 18th century mountaineers who made it to the peak of Chimborazo really
*were* standing on top of the world - just not in the way they thought.
So, Everest, Mauna Kea, or Chimborazo?
Ultimately it's up to you. But there's a very real argument that of these three mountains, Everest
actually has the *least* claim to the title of the tallest on earth. Mauna Kea is objectively
the 'biggest,‘ and Chimborazo is indisputably the 'highest‘. By comparison, Everest's record
as the highest peak above sea level starts to sound kind of niche, even a little arbitrary.
Don't get me wrong, Everest remains a majestic and
inspiring place. It pierces further into the atmosphere than any other mountain,
making its peak one of the most extreme places ever visited by man. It has an incredible
history and its status as a mountain of legendary proportions is well deserved.
But that doesn‘t change the fact that there are several perfectly reasonable
ways of measuring the tallest mountain on earth, and Everest only wins one of them.
Thanks for watching.