I recently read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, and came down with a bit of Everest fever.
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| Hung these bad boys up in my room |
Rather letting the dream of climbing the darn thing slowly start to take hold in my mind, or fantasizing about flying into Nepal and landing at one of the sketchiest airports in the world (see video below), my Everest fever manifested itself by driving me to share some tidbits and facts about mountains with all you fine people.
Landing at the Lukla airport
The first question I'll dive into is "How do we measure the tallest Mountain?" When measured as 'height above sea level,' Everest gets the #1 spot, but Everest is not the tallest mountain when measured from base to peak. That honor belongs to Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
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| Measured from base to peak, Mauna Kea is much taller than Everest |
On top of the 'Mauna Kea,' there is a suite of telescopes. My two personal favorites are the Keck binocular telescopes and the Subaru telescope (the car company and the telescope are both named for the Pleiades, known as "Subaru" in Japan). Pretty cool.
I also think that Chimborazo is worth mentioning here. An argument could be made that Chimborazo is the 'highest' because it is the farthest point from the center of the earth. Because the Earth is not quite solid, and it's rotating, Earth is not spherical; the middle bulges out by several kilometers. Chimborazo, being a tall mountain situated near the equator means it gets an extra boost, making this peak the farthest you can get from the center of the Earth.
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Image: David Torres Costales
Chimborazo |
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| Image: Maphill.com
Chimborazo is located near the Equator
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In thinking about mountains, I began thinking about how mountains are measured, and how peaks are defined. I have heard of are so-called twin peaks, such as Greys and Torreys, two nearby 14ers (peaks over 14,000') here in Colorado, but what is the cutoff point between two distinct peaks and say a north and south summit of the same peak?
This brings me to the idea of "prominence." Prominence is loosely "how far the mountain sticks up from it's surroundings."
Prominence is defined as "the vertical distance between the summit and the lowest contour line that does not also include a higher peak"
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| Image: Cmglee |
In the image above, we are looking at three mountains with differing heights and levels of prominence. The dashed horizontal lines in the image above are contour lines. Looking at the middle peak, we can see that any lower contour line would also have to include the peak on the right. Likewise, for the peak on the right, any lower contour line would also need to include the peak on the left. The highest peak's contour line goes right down to the coastline because no other contour line includes a higher peak, giving it the most prominence.
This creates a problem. Everest has a North and a South Summit, but would these summits qualify for the worlds first and second tallest mountains? What's to keep several rocky outcrops near the summit of Everest from being called the world's ten tallest peaks? It turns out there is no set minimum to decide on what constitutes a separate peak, but I was able to dig up something called the 'Colorado Rule,' which holds to a minimum of 300' of prominence to be called a separate peak. For reference, that makes the Maroon Bells two summits of the same peak:
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| Image: USDA |
Moving away from mountains in general, and on to Everest Itself, I'd like to talk next about the Khumbu Icefall. This is a section of the southern route up Everest, and it is one of the more dangerous sections of the climb. All those photos you see of climbers walking over ladders are from the Khumbu Icefall:
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| Image: Pem Dorjee Sherpa |
Situated just above base camp, the icefall is the end of the Khumbu Glacier. Pieces of ice the size of houses are moving down the icefall, and shifting at the rate of meters per day, sometimes coming loose and tumbling down the glacier. Here is a link to beautiful timelaspe showing how much the icefall moves over the course of many hours:
Everest being at the elevation it is, has some interesting properties. Above 8,000 meters, or the so-called "Death Zone," you need supplemental oxygen (unless you're a badass), but the thin air has another interesting property: water boils at relatively low temperatures at different points along the route from the nearby cities to base camp and beyond:
Lastly, I'll talk about how Everest got its name. George Everest, (pronounced with a long 'e') was a surveyor general and was given the task of mapping the Indian subcontinent. After he was in a different job, a peak appearing on one of the maps produced ("peak 15" on the map) was found to be the world's highest. His successor, Andrew Scott Waugh, suggested the name "Everest" be applied to the mountain, given the lack of a local name for the peak. Interestingly, Everest never even saw Peak XV, later known as Everest.
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| Image: Wikimedia Commons |
Cheers,
- Scott
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