: How the highest mountain and lowest valley would be X metres apart is used when explaining how round something is.
In: 0
The average distance to the center of the plane is about 6,371 km
The highest mountain (Everest) is 8.848 km tall.
The shore of the Dead sea is about 0.43 km below sea level.
The deepest point of the Marianna trench the sea is about 11 km below sea level.
If you look at these numbers you see that the deepest trenches and the deepest mountains are basically nothing compared to the size of the earth.
The difference from the peaks of the tallest mountain to the deepest trenches is only about a third of a percent of the earth’s radius.
If you reduced the planet to something human sized the difference in height would be reduced to mere millimeters.
That is very smooth.
Of course the earth is not perfectly round.
But the thing you would notice first if it were reduced to sizes that you can observer would be ever so slightly elliptic. the distance from pole to pole is about 40km shorter than from one point on th equator to its antipode.
40 km is not nothing especially compared to the size of mountains and valleys here on earth but it is still a tiny fraction only of the size of the planet.
By all measures the world is an incredibly smooth and regular sphere of molten rock with a rather thing but incredibly even crust of solid stone with a slightly damp surface.
Latest Answers