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Where is the highest place that you can climb up to on Earth?

This simple question has been around with us for thousands of years, and the answer has always evolved over time, as our understanding of the planet has gotten better and better.

The answer to the question that probably immediately jumped into your head, however, is Mount Everest, which by every appeal to common sense, is the tallest mountain in the world and therefore is the highest up that you can get to anywhere on the planet while still standing on the surface.

But any answer to this question could get significantly more complicated, depending on how you phrase the question.

And there could be other answers besides just Everest.

Here's what I mean.

Most measurements of height across the world are expressed in distance above the main global sea level.

New York City, right by the sea, is only 10 m above the sea, located further inland.

Denver is over 1.5 kilometers above the sea level.

Machu Pichu is nearly 2.5 kilometers above the sea, while the summit of Mount Everest beats everything else out at precisely 8008 148 m above the sea.

Nearly every measurement of height across the world is done in this way, and by that metric Everest is indeed the highest stuff you can possibly get to.

But there is another way that you can measure height on earth distance on the surface, above the Earth Center, as in, If you were stuck in the center of the Earth for whatever reason, how far up could you climb up in any direction that would get you the furthest away from it?

If we use this method of height, we unexpectedly get a complete, completely different answer than Everest for where the highest place on earth ISS.

And here's how.

While Earth looks like a sphere, it isn't really upon closer evaluation.

Earth's true shape is more akin to an oblate spheroid, meaning that it bulges out slightly more across the center than at the poles.

The reason why Earth is like this is because it rotates around really, really quickly, and the central feudal forces from that rotation pushed the shape of the planet out around the equator.

So, as a result, on object sitting on the equator will be 22 kilometers higher up from the Earth center Thanet object sitting on one of the polls would be now, of course, mountains, hills and valleys exist all across the planet that affects these heights beyond the Earth's center, too.

But they don't really play is a big of a role, as most people think they do in the grander scheme of things.

Everything above the Earth's crust can be imagined as the planet's surface, with a little bit of water filling some of the deeper parts up.

With that in mind, let's take the difference in height between the deepest point on earth surface above the crust, the Marianas Trench and the supposed highest point at Mount Everest.

The difference between the two is 19,759 m, which is only 0.3% the same as Earth's radius.

So there's really not that much variation and elevation on Earth's surface comps paired with the fuller size of the planets.

So with that in mind, Let's take a closer look at Everest.

Everest is 8848 m high above sea level, but with the location of 27 degrees, 59 minutes north of the equator and therefore north of the equatorial bulge of the planets.

The summit is located 6382 kilometers above the Earth Center.

Further back towards the equatorial bulge, however, we can find a lot of points on Earth that are actually higher up than this.

It's just that the entire continent of mainland Asia is actually located north of the equator, so none of the mountains here get that big of an underground boost.

On the other hand, the equator actually does pass directly through South America and right through the Andes mountain chain, which is already the largest mountain range found anywhere outside of Asia.

Ah, lot of peaks around the equator here in the Andes are actually higher up from the center of the Earth and Everest ISS, because the bulge gives them a few extra kilometers underneath as a sort of handicap.

Let's take Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador as the prime example of this measured by sea level.

Chimborazo is already pretty impressive at 6268 m high, which is higher up than any other mountain in Africa, North America or Europe.

But it's a substantial 2.5 kilometers lower than Everest ISS.

However, owing to Chimborazo is location on Lee, one degree and 28 minutes south of the equator, it gets a pretty substantial boost in height from the earth's bulge.

The summit of Chimborazo, therefore, is 6385 four kilometers above the Earth Center, which is two kilometers further away than the summit of Everest ISS.

This means that is measured from the center of the earth.

The summit of Chimborazo is the highest up you can possibly get anywhere on the earth's surface.

This also means that the closest you can get to the moon anywhere on earth surface is at the summit of Chimborazo and not Everest.

In fact, there's several mountain peaks in this area of the Andes around the equator that are all higher up than the Earth Center than Everest.

ISS and Everest itself isn't even technically the world's tallest mountain, either.

Tall and high have very different meanings.

For one thing, Tall is a measure of how physically tall and object stands, while high just means how high up in elevation and object ISS.

For example, let's take a 2 m tall person at sea level and a 1 m tall person on top of Everest.

The 2 m person is distinctly taller than the 1 m person, while the 1 m person is distinctly higher up in elevation.

Keep that in mind and let's compare Mount Everest with Madonna Kia in Hawaii.

If you measured both of these mountains based on their elevation upwards from sea level, you'd see that Madonna Kia is a puny 4207 m high above the water compared with Everest mighty 8848 m.

However, if you somehow removed the water, you'd see that the base of my own Nokia is in fact, much, much bigger than what it seems at first.

That's because 58% of Madonna Kia is actually underwater, so from base to tip, it's actually a whopping 10,200 m tall compared with Everest unchanged and now seemingly puny 8848 m.

So Everest is certainly not the world's tallest mountain.

And depending on how you're measuring things, it's not even necessarily the world's highest mountain, either.

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