Shape of the Earth

well fellas there is the difference between relief and elevation.
Relief is a local measure of how high an object is from some local
base. If we choose that local base in the case of Everest to be the
abyssal plain of the Indian Ocean then Everest is "higher" than Mauna
Loa. If we chose the local base to be the base camp of the Everest
climbers as a local base and the abyssal plain of the Pacific for Mauna
Loa then Mauna Loa is "higher". Mauna Loa is supported by the buouyancy
of the water column Eversest is not. We commonly use mean seal level as
a global datum. Measured from that datum the Earth is essentially a
sphere. The proportion of volume involved in local deviations from the
sphere is infinitesimal. In that frame, Everest and Mauna Loa are just
"noise' except to people our size. I wonder what an orange "looks" like
to an amoeba?

Odysseus wrote:

Painius wrote:


? Odysseus, it's the sea floor where the mountains sit... it's the
part of the plateau on which Everest sits... why would you think
it might be anywhere else? Why is all this so hard for everyone
to see?



What are the exact elevations of said sea floor and plateau? Where do
you choose to start your measurement? That's what I've been asking
all along, yet you seem to keep pointing at the "sea floor" and the
"plateau" as if mountains were plonked on to -- or pop up out of --
an otherwise featureless surface.



I wish i could find Asimov's treatment of this. It's around here
somewhere but i cannot find it. He explained it so much better
than i can.

You remove the water. The mountains rise up from a flat surface.

For Kea and Loa this flat surface is the ocean floor. For Everest
this flat surface is the plateau. When you measure Everest from
the surface of the plateau to its summit, then measure the volcanos
from the ocean floor where they sit up to their summits, you find
that the volcanos are nearly two times as tall as Everest.



Are you claiming that the Pacific floor and the Tibetan plateau,
other than having the odd mountain here and there, are perfectly
flat? Try looking at a map that shows relief with some semblance of
realism, rather than an sketch-map that depicts mountains as
upside-down Vs -- really, I can't see where else you'd get such a
picture of the earth's topography.


I'm outta here.



Since you're apparently unable to answer my repeated requests (and
Brett's) for some kind of quantitative rationale for your claim (and
Bert's -- hey, almost an anagram!), and since nobody has been
convinced by your hand-waving at the "sea floor" and the "plateau" as
if they were flat as griddles, I agree that you have few other options.

--Odysseus

"Robert Ehrlich" wrote in message fellas there is the difference between relief and elevation. Relief is a local measure of how high an object is from some local base. If we choose that local base in the case of Everest to be the abyssal plain of the Indian Ocean then Everest is "higher" than Mauna Loa. If we chose the local base to be the base camp of the Everest climbers as a local base and the abyssal plain of the Pacific for Mauna Loa then Mauna Loa is "higher".

BA:
Yes. Using multiple arbitrary points and measurements, you can choose anything to be higher, but if you say from 'Everest base camp to the summit', then it's not "Everest", it's an arbitrary portion of Everest. And if you choose 'Hillary Step to the summit', it's still not "Everest". And if you choose the abysmal plain, from where are you measuring? If it is a point (and a single low elevation is VERY likely to be a point), where is this point? If it's a deep point somewhere in the East Pacific Basin of Hawaii, then you are measuring just one slope, just as if you measure Everest from some point in the East Indian ocean, or Aconcagua from the Richard Deep, or Guam from the Challenger Deep. And if it's a deep point somewhere in the East Pacific Basin of Hawaii, then to "buzz-saw" it off (Paine's analogy), you get some 85% (likely more) of the earth's surface, including Everest, with only a few small "holes" where the deeper trenches and basins exist (... that dawg don't hunt!).

As stated, Maua Loa is only higher if you choose unequal and arbitrary points. And the way it looks thus far, since no one has yet to come up with a geographic location for a Mauna Loa base, this point can only arbitrarily measure one slope, which can be handily "bested" by choosing any of an infinity of arbirary points for Everest in the Mid-Indian Basin. Regards, Brett.

snip

"Painius" wrote:
snip

As you can see by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, saying "abysmal plain" says
very littly quantatatively about depth. Hence our continued requests for a
location for your point. Especially when there's a range from ~10,000
~20,000 ft., are generally adjancent to a continent and are most rare in the
Pacific, making your claim even more incredulous (at max. depth of this
definition, *not* adjacent to a continent, plus in the Pacific, where
abyssmal plains are rare.)

http://concise.britannica.com/ebc/article?eu=379759

Abyssmal Plain:

Flat seafloor area at a depth of 10,000-20,000 ft (3,000-6,000 m), generally
adjacent to a continent.

The larger plains are hundreds of miles wide and thousands of miles long.
The plains are largest and most common in the Atlantic Ocean, less common in
the Indian Ocean, and even rarer in the Pacific Ocean, where they occur
mainly as small, flat floors of marginal seas or as long, narrow bottoms of
trenches. They are thought to be the upper surfaces of land-derived sediment
that accumulates in abyssal depressions.

Regards, Brett.

Brett Aubrey wrote:


"Robert Ehrlich" wrote in message
fellas there is the
difference between relief and elevation. Relief is a local measure
of how high an object is from some local base. If we choose that
local base in the case of Everest to be the abyssal plain of the
Indian Ocean then Everest is "higher" than Mauna Loa. If we chose
the local base to be the base camp of the Everest climbers as a
local base and the abyssal plain of the Pacific for Mauna Loa then
Mauna Loa is "higher".

BA:
[snip]

As stated, Maua Loa is only higher if you choose unequal and
arbitrary points. And the way it looks thus far, since no one has
yet to come up with a geographic location for a Mauna Loa base,
this point can only arbitrarily measure one slope, which can be
handily "bested" by choosing any of an infinity of arbirary points
for Everest in the Mid-Indian Basin. Regards, Brett.

Well, I think Robert has put his finger on it in mentioning "relief".
One could define a mountain's "base" as a contour where the slope,
averaged over a given minimum distance, falls below a certain value
as one moves away from the region of the peak. But since it's been
Herb and Painius that are making the "tallest" claim, I don't think
it's up to us to do their work for them by continuing to propose
criteria that they might avail themselves of in order to make their
assertions meaningful, i.e. possible to evaluate quantitatively.

(BTW, guys, please refrain from posting in HTML.)

--Odysseus

"Odysseus" wrote:
Brett Aubrey wrote:

"Robert Ehrlich" wrote: well fellas there is
the difference between relief and elevation. Relief is a local measure
of how high an object is from some local base. If we choose that
local base in the case of Everest to be the abyssal plain of the
Indian Ocean then Everest is "higher" than Mauna Loa. If we
chose the local base to be the base camp of the Everest climbers
as a local base and the abyssal plain of the Pacific for Mauna Loa
then Mauna Loa is "higher".

BA:
[snip]
As stated, Maua Loa is only higher if you choose unequal and
arbitrary points. And the way it looks thus far, since no one has
yet to come up with a geographic location for a Mauna Loa base,
this point can only arbitrarily measure one slope, which can be
handily "bested" by choosing any of an infinity of arbirary points
for Everest in the Mid-Indian Basin. Regards, Brett.

Well, I think Robert has put his finger on it in mentioning "relief".
One could define a mountain's "base" as a contour where the slope,
averaged over a given minimum distance, falls below a certain value
as one moves away from the region of the peak. But since it's been
Herb and Painius that are making the "tallest" claim, I don't think
it's up to us to do their work for them by continuing to propose
criteria that they might avail themselves of in order to make their
assertions meaningful, i.e. possible to evaluate quantitatively.
(BTW, guys, please refrain from posting in HTML.)
--Odysseus

1. While I understand both Robert and your point, it still comes down to an
arbitrary, non-standard and not-yet-defined position, and the chance of any
peak in the Hawaiian chain besting all the taller peaks (by standard
definitions) in the Himalayas, Andes, Russia, European Alps and elsewhere by
any fair definition is extraordinarily tenuous at best. And for any new
definition like this, one would have to start from scratch and do all peaks
by the same, or as similar as possible, definition.
2. I wouldn't care if they can take anything said by me or anyone else and
make their assertions meaningful, as long as there is some fairness and
sense in the position. Using, say, a point in the Mariana Trench for one
peak and a glacier or plain for another just doesn't cut it. Nor does
saying some "flat" part of the Pacific cut it (unless the flat part
surrounds the entire peak and little or nothing else, which clearly does not
happen for the Maunas).
3.; Interestingly, Robert's criteria would cut the Maunas down to fairly
insignificant bumps (Nubbin Loa and Nubbin Kea?), for in the case of both
peaks, the contour rises from the saddle between them to the other peak.
Even if they wanted to use the whole island with the twin Maunas as part of
a newly defined "Mt. Hawaii", it would only go down a few thousand feet
until rising up to to Maui, the rest of the chain and many other undersea
areas.

I'd think they might want to avoid the use of "relief"... OTOH, their
responses continue to surprise and amaze... Best regards, Brett.

P.S. Let me know if this was HTML, please.

"Painius" wrote in message
...
"Brett Aubrey" wrote in message...
a...

. . . can you answer a question asked several times and to my
knowledge never answered... from where is the base being measured?
TIA.
Regards, Brett.

One more time, Brett... this question was answered *several*
times including in Bert's original post.

I disagree. It has not.

His reference was to remove all the water including the glacial
ice around Everest. So... if you then take a giant buzz saw and
remove Everest from the plateau on which it sits, then enlist the
aid of our hero, Superman, to fly the mountain over to the dry
Pacific basin, and gently place it down on the sea floor near the
volcanos, then Loa and Kea would dwarf Everest... each of
them being nearly twice as "tall" as the mountain (and quite a bit
"fatter" as well).

Why cut everest down at the plain? This is exactly the problem with this
discussion. There is NO singular measurement point, which invalidates the
whole argument.

There is no need for all this defensive behavior. Nobody ever
challenged Everest's place as the world's highest mountain above
sea level. All that was said was that if you remove all the water
from view, Everest is not the tallest mountain... which is true!

Mount Everest remains to this day the most challenging of
climbing feats. It is indeed the highest cemetery in the world!

For more reasons then it's height.

BV.

Brett,

Check these atlases I get to use, they are a little more updated than
yours.

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/image/2minrelief.html

This is a 2 mimute resolution dataset that combine bathymetry and
topography.

Now click on the 45 degree block that contains the Hawaiian islands.

This should enlarge the view for you.

Note that The Big Island of Hawaii (both ML and MK and the other peaks)
has a portion of itself as blue.

If each pixel is then 2 minutes, one can determine that all slopes of ML
are within 1 degree of its peak. (34.5 pixels to be exact)

Now do the same for ME, now this might be a little harder, since ME is not
as easy to pick out of the Himalayan range. Here is a hint 28.0 N, 86.9
E. But if I had to help you find ME and you could find ML by yourself
does not that say something...

Now since you sarcastically pushed aside my comment of using ESRI to help
your spatial analysis as a plug. Then maybe you would like to use another
software, Mapinfo, Erdas Imagine, Idrisi, ENVI. This should help you.
But I see another plug comment coming.

Now take the same circle of 34.5 pixels which was the same measurement to
ML's base. Note this is skewed since we are measuring ME to ML, if can
provide the same level of spatial analysis with ML to ME, I would
entertain that.

I just want reiterate that the number has been state 34.5 pixels of 2
minutes each pixel for a number that is approx. 1 Degree.

You measure every point of within 1 degree of ME an every point of within
1 degree of ML and you will find that subtracting the mean value from the
peak you get a greater overall displacement for ML.

That said the areal extent of ML is also larger than ME, this is even
more convincing to me that ME is JUST AN UPLIFTED ROCK when compared to
ML.

For more sources bathymetry and topograhpy check out,
http://www.marinegis.com/dataen.html



__o
_ \_
(_)/(_)

Hi Brett Take away earth water throw a rock off Everest,and throw the
same size rock off Loa and tell me what rock came to a stop first????
We all know the answer Bert

"G=EMC^2 Glazier" wrote...
Hi Brett Take away earth water throw a rock off Everest,
and throw the same size rock off Loa and tell me what
rock came to a stop first???? We all know the answer Bert.

No, you don't, but this doesn't answer address your claim, anyways.
Mininally, it depends on which way you throw it. Now theoretically, if
you're very, very careful and very, very lucky, it might possibly go down
the single slope to a deep point in the East Pacific Basin or the Hawaiian
trough. In that extremely unlikely case, we still don't know the answer
because you've still not given us the location of your deep point, which may
or may not be in the Hawaiin Trough. Is your point 200 feet offshore, 800
miles off shore, or in the Mariana Trench some 4,000 miles away? And this
scenario addresses only single-slope length and is of use only for boulder
trundling*, as opposed to mountain tallness or height.

You're still not being honest with yourself, Bert... until you know the
location, you simply can NOT know the answer (unless, of course, you're
being trollish and simply not telling us this location). And if the
location's 200 feet off shore, again, all you've got is (maybe, depending on
several factors), a single hypothetical longer slope than one on Everest.

But in reality, we both know the rock won't even reach the beach. And if
you throw this rock in another direction and it manages to go to another
level point, it can end up a relatively pitiful 4,000-6,000 feet down (very
rough estimate, since I have no good Hawaiian maps) in the Kea - Loa saddle.
Give up the hypothetical, I'd say, and start being honest with yourself.

More importantly, even if it did roll to your deep point, a rock thrown off
any of hundreds of Andes summits will be rolling looooonnnng after yours has
stopped at your arbitrary deep point, since there the difference between
summits and arbitrary deep points in the Atacama Trench is up to 49,295
feet, dwarfing your slope (i.e. this is a fair comparison - a deep point in
a trough or basin vs. a deep point in a trench). And you still have the
rest of the world to figure out - with this new definition you're
introducing, you can't simply take Everest and Mauna Kea and ignore all
other mountain slopes. And most of the world won't care much about the
longest slope, anyway.

Mauna X is not the highest, by any but the most parochial, constricted, and
arbitrary definitions, and likely not even then, as I'm coming to realise
with each new scenario you come up with. Deal with it. And please come
back with data relevant to others' figures please or your own past arguments
(like location and depth), instead of constantly raising new and yet more
flawed analogies. Also, have a look at TelNetPirate's 12:22 post today...
it might give you a better chance at some valid scenario (I'm still looking
at it).

Best regards, Brett.

See SF Forrester's "Boulder Trundling" in Ken Wilson's "Games Climbers
Play - A collection of Mountaineering Writing" c1978, Sierra Books, for an
enlightening essay on this hallowed sport.

Bert posted:

Take away earth water throw a rock off Everest,and throw the
same size rock off Loa and tell me what rock came to a stop first????
We all know the answer Bert

Yup, those of us who know those Hawaiian volcanoes well know the answer:
it will stop first when thrown from the top of Mauna Loa. The slopes of
the volcano are so gentle that probably most people would have a lot of
trouble getting one to go even 100 yards before it came to rest a little
ways down the slope. The slopes of Everest are a lot steeper, so the
same-size rock would probably go a lot farther down the slopes unless it
got stuck in some ice on the way down.
--
David W. Knisely
Prairie Astronomy Club: http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org
Hyde Memorial Observatory: http://www.hydeobservatory.info/

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