Why isn't the Millennium date December 25, 2000?

[lektor]

Greg Bernhardt?

 

[Integral]

Why would you think that a millennium is only 999 yrs long? Shouldn't it be 1000? Also, after living my entire life in 19XX and calling it the 20th century why can't I have even 1 year where that name makes some sense? Finally in 2000 I actually felt like I was in the 20th century, now you tell me that it you want that year to be in the 21st century, is there no Justus in the world, can nothing ever make sense?

 

[Mk]

At first I thought he was talking poopy, but it turned out yeah, he's right, there does exist Mount Chimborazo, that has the farthest point from the Earth's COM.

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

"Mountains are generally measured from sea level, in which case Mount Everest (29,028 feet; 8,848 meters) is king."
8,848 m (Everest)
"Hawaii's Mauna Kea, though, rises an astonishing 33,476 feet (10,203 meters) from the depths of the Pacific Ocean floor. Measuring from base to peak, Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain on earth."
10,203 m (Mauna Kea)
"A third way to determine the world's highest mountain is to measure the distance from the center of the Earth to the peak. Using this method, Chimborazo in the Andes triumphs. Although it stands but 20,561 feet (6,267 meters) above sea level, its peak is the farthest from the Earth's center."
6,267 m (Chimborazo)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Chimborazo

The mountain's claim to fame relies on a peculiarity of the Earth's diameter at the equator. Since the Earth bulges at the equator and Chimborazo is just one degree south, this means the summit of Chimborazo is the furthest point from the center of the Earth. However, since the elevations of mountains are given in relation to mean sea level, Everest (8,850 m; 29,035 feet) is given the glory of highest point on Earth.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s1086384.htm

Back in the 17th and 18th Century, it was thought that a certain Mount Chimborazo, an extinct snow-capped volcano in Ecuador, was the highest point on Earth, at 6,310 metres above sea level. In 1852, the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India measured that a certain mountain with the name of Peak XV was the tallest at 8,840 metres. The British gave it the name of Everest in 1865, after Sir George Everest, who was the British Surveyor General from 1830-1843, even though the local Tibetans and Nepalese had already given the mountain some perfectly decent names (Chomolungma or Mother Goddess of the Land by the Tibetans, and Sagarmatha by the Nepalese).

The height of Mt. Everest was adjusted to 8,848 metres in 1955, and then to 8,850 metres in 1999, after a team of nine climbers used state-of-the-art satellite measuring devices on the summit. All of these heights are measured above sea level, or where the local sea level would be, if a mountain was not there.

So let's look at Mt Chimborazo, which was once thought to be the tallest mountain on Earth. It was first climbed by Edward Whymper in 1880.

The reason that Mt. Everest is not the highest point on Earth is that the Earth spins - and this spin makes the whole planet bulge outwards at the equator.

Mt. Chimborazo is about 1.5° from the equator, while Mt. Everest is a lot further around the curve of the Earth at 28°. So even though Mt. Chimborazo is about 2,540 metres closer to sea level than Mt Everest, it is about 2,202 metres further away from the centre of the Earth. If this were better known, perhaps the achievements of the Conqueror of Chimborazo, Edward Whymper, would have made more of a bang. (In fact, there are three other peaks (Huascaran, Cotopaxi and Kilimanjaro) that are also "higher" than Everest.)

But Everest is still the highest mountain above sea level. So, by the end of 2001, some 1,314 people had reached the summit, and 167 people had died trying. If you have $US 65,000, and are physically fit, you can try to reach the peak. But if you don't have that kind of money to blow, you can console yourself with the knowledge that they're all climbing the wrong mountain anyway. On the other hand, Mt Everest is growing at 4 mm each year as India rams into Tibet, so all the wealthy people have to do is wait another half-million years...