Chimborazo...the “Highest” Spot on Earth?

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Mount Everest at 29,035 feet is the highest spot above sea level on Earth. But, what if instead of looking for the highest spot above sea level you wanted to find the spot on Earth closest to the moon, the stars, and outer space (not a bad reason to climb a mountain). You’d probably still head to Everest, right? Wrong.

It turns out that the Earth is not a perfect sphere. It’s an “oblate s...

The NPR article/broadcast is a bit behind the times. The fact that Chimborazo is the farthest summit from the center of the Earth (which is the same as saying "closest to the Sun, Moon, stars, and outer space") has been known for at least my ancient lifetime (I first heard this before I was 9 or 10 years old). I think it may even have been in the old Ripley's Believe It or Not.

But the air density on top of Chimborazo is not as low as on Everest, thanks to the bulge of the atmosphere caused by the rotation of the Earth. At the poles the air is thinner at a given physical altitude than at lower latitudes. I checked this during my Antarctic trip last Dec and Jan, and found at the Vinson High Camp (highest measurement I made), the air pressure was equivalent to 1500 feet higher than the surveyed physical altitude above sea level (13,500 from the Standard Atmosphere Tables, compared to 12,000 from the carefully surveyed GPS altitude.