What was the tallest mountain prior to Everest?

[JKellyMap]

@bardos

Disregard this post.
My original thought upon reading the thread title “What was the tallest mountain prior to Everest?” was: which mountain held the record before Everest was “discovered”?

My answer was going to be that even though not discovered Everest was still the highest mountain on the planet.

Interesting question, though…what did Western/European civilization believe to be the highest mountain in the world before it realized it was Everest? And how about the one before that? Maybe you should start a thread on this. (I think maybe Chimbarazo, and Matterhorn before that, and Ararat before that, might be parts of this story, but I’m not sure. The question can’t be answered perfectly neatly, of course, since “Western/European civilization” is ill-defined, and surely different people within it had varying ideas about the subject.)

[coremelt]

another previous thread:

Tallest Mountain ever?

[njtt]

@ChrisBooth12

Since this is the SD and we like to nit pick and be “technically correct” (the best kind of correct). Everest is the highest range not the tallest

What nit is being picked here? Do “highest” and “tallest” really have well defined different meanings in this context?

Also, is Everest really a range rather than a mountain?

[Acsenray]

@njtt

What nit is being picked here? Do “highest” and “tallest” really have well defined different meanings in this context?

I’m wagging that the “tallest” mountain could have its base at the bottom of the ocean and thus not be the “highest.”

[Waenara]

@Acsenray

I’m wagging that the “tallest” mountain could have its base at the bottom of the ocean and thus not be the “highest.”

I don’t know for sure, but I agree that’s probably the distinction they wanted to make.

For example:

@Wikipedia

Standing 4,205 m (13,796 ft) above sea level, its peak is the highest point in the state of Hawaii. However, much of the mountain is under water; when measured from its oceanic base, Mauna Kea is over 10,000 m (33,000 ft) tall—significantly taller than Mount Everest.

[yabob]

What nit is being picked here? Do “highest” and “tallest” really have well defined different meanings in this context?

Different means, yes. “Well defined” in the sense of “agreed upon”, no.

I’m wagging that the “tallest” mountain could have its base at the bottom of the ocean and thus not be the “highest.”

That’s one of the alternates, leading one to declare Manua Kea the “tallest”. Another measure is actual distance from the peak to the center of the Earth (Chimborazo wins):

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/BeataUnke.shtml

ETA:

I’m also not sure how you precisely define what the “base” of a mountain is. The surrounding landscape may very well slope leading up to it. Where do you start measuring?

[Boyo_Jim]

@yabob

… Another measure is actual distance from the peak to the center of the Earth (Chimborazo wins):

Height of the Tallest Mountain on Earth - The Physics Factbook

…

In my personal opinion, we can worry about his last measurement when people establish a base camp at the center of the earth and start climbing from there.

Come to think about it, that goes for undersea mountains too. Kind of interesting to think that if there was such a sport as underwater mountain climbing, the challenge would be to get to the bottom rather than the top.

[JWT_Kottekoe]

@The_Niply_Elder

Off by half an order of magnitude…

Actually a bit better than a factor of two, less than a third of an order of magnitude. Weisskopf (and I) would consider this remarkably close, based on the crudeness of the approximation. That’s the whole point of back-of-the-envelope estimates. With a few simple approximations you can get within a small factor of the correct answer. Physicists do this all the time.