Everyone knows Everest is the highest mountain at a colossal 8,848m above sea level. But, depending on how you’re measuring, there are two other candidates for tallest mountain.

Mauna Kea is a volcano on the big island of Hawaii. In fact the whole island is made from volcano, so as a peak it rises from the base of the Pacific ocean to over 4,200m above sea level. Including the part of the mountain that rises from the sea bed it is over 10,000m tall.

Mt Chimborazo can also lay a claim to the tallest mountain. The Earth is not a perfect sphere — it bulges around the Equator meaning that points on the Equator are several kilometres further from the centre of the Earth than points further North or South. A bulging around the centre is a common shape for a spinning sphere due to the force exerted by the spinning. Sitting almost exactly on the Equator means that Chimborazo’s already enormous 6,263m from sea level makes its summit the furthest point on the Earth’s surface from the centre of the Earth.

I’m not totally sure if that means that at some point Chimborazo’s summit makes it the closest point to the sun, but it definitely sounds plausible! 

The 3 tallest mountains

A type of projection that looks distorted when viewed from a standard vantage point or means, but can reveal itself spectacularly from the right point or using the right tool.

This is the technique responsible for making 3D looking ads on rugby fields that players can run over as if they weren’t there; or how they create those amazing street art holes; or how S L O W painted on a road may look just right when driving towards it but weird and long when seen from the side; or how Hans Holbein the younger tucked a skull into his painting The Ambassadors in the National Gallery. But others may require viewing with a mirror or a circular viewer to reveal themselves as intended.

Anamorphic art is therefore referred to as an intimate art as, even in an art gallery, the true picture may only reveal themselves to one person viewing in just the right way.

Also see: one-point perspective, two-point perspective, 3-point perspective, draw what you see, not what you think, atmospheric perspective.

PS you’ll have to tilt your screen or move to quite an angle to see Tilt me look like normal letters in the sketch.

Anamorphosis

In the UK and certain temperate latitudes there’s a period where the weather gets warmer and the season late for the winter crops, while the temperatures can still be too low for the Summer crops to get going. This period is known as the Hungry Gap — from late April, through May and a little of early June — as it’s hard to pick enough crops locally at that time of year to live off.

Ellen Warrell at Riverford Organic Farmers explains the Hungry Gap, including ways to manage it. For example, did you know that “Trucking tomatoes over from Spain uses just a tenth of the carbon compared with growing them in the UK using heat.”

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The Hungry Gap