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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

A bit off-topic, but...

"If Mount Everest were flipped upside down into it, there would still be more than 2km of clear water between the mountain’s base and the top of the ocean"

This statement always bugs me, the elevation at Everest's base is already ~14,000ft. Its prominence is not its full elevation. When you try to have someone imagine "flipping it upside down", a person wouldn't typically consider including the surrounding terrain, but simply ignore the fact that it's already at great elevation.

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I get what you're saying, but the definition of the term 'prominence' doesn't help you, because by definition, Mount Everest's 'prominence' equals its actual height above MSL. This special case is necessary to give the recursive definition of 'prominence' a base case.

However, it's true that Mount Everest's "relief above local terrain" is not equal to its actual altitude above MSL, but this is just informal empirical footballing and no rigorous technical definitions exist.

you're right, i mis-used "prominence" and meant "relief above local terrain"

If only the Earth were a perfectly featureless sphere how simple things would be.

But it nearly is one!

> If only the Earth were a perfectly featureless sphere how simple things would be.

<rant>

Blah, boring. I remember a girl describing how nice everything would be if everything was symmetrical and deterministic, from language, to language, to numbers, to nature, to math... In the end she went on describing heaven as such a place... Man, for the first time in my life I thought that if heaven is like this, I'd like never go there :-)

When Homer described Helen, he wrote "The most beautiful woman in the world", he left the details to the reader. Now imagine if he had added the slightest hint of determinism...

</rant>

I might just be arguing semantics here, but it's possible that the world we live in is determinist, just in a way too complex for us to even grasp.

That doesn't take away my argument though: It would be too boring if there was nothing patternless.

Climbers have a definition: how far is it from base camp to the top? In other words, the mountain starts where "walking" becomes something more difficult than a gravel path.

Another version of this is distance between the parking lot and the top, at what point are wheeled vehicles no longer an option?

But if you would flip the ME into it, the sealevel would rise ...

What, a couple millimeters?

So, Earth surface 510M km2, 70% water that's some 350M km2.

Everest 8km by, say, way too generously 10x20 km2, that's 1600 km3 worth of rock prism.

1.6k km3 / 350M km2 = 4.5 micro km = 4.5 millimeters.

(Yeah, a couple mm.)

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