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It's Chimborazo, Ecuador, but only just, beating Huascarán, Peru, by less than 50 metres. Both are over 2 km 'higher' than Everest.
I made a plot of some mountains — height above centre of the earth vs absolute latitude. You can download the IPython Notebook source code here. Warning: v. hacky.
I can't find anything on the position of the centre of the ...
49
This is mostly due to the fact that Mars does not have plate tectonics. Therefore the plate stays above the hotspot without moving, allowing magma to rise and pile up at the same place for millions and millions of years. Above the Hawaii hotspot, the oceanic plate is moving, so volcanism tends to drift away with time (actually the volcanism happens at the ...
23
Mount Chimborazo, which is 6,268 meters above sea level and within 1.5 degrees of the equator.
More specifically, according to Dr. Milbert, Chief Geodesist, NOAA, National Geodetic Survey and Dr. Shum, Geodetic Science & Surveying, Ohio State Univ.:
distance from Earth's center of mass, with an uncertainty of only +/- 2 meters:
Mt. Chimborazo - 6384....
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Is there some kind of math rule for how much does a mountain extends (depth) below the surface?
Definitely! It is called isostasy. When I was a student, the lecture about isostasy started with a slide asking "why don't the mountains fall over?" (it may sound better in my native language..)
First, some background:
Mountains, and in general the Earth's ...
22
Since over half of the height of Mauna Kea is under water, you need to consider the buoyancy effect. Instead of a density of $3 \times 10^3\ \mathrm{kg/m^3}$, the underwater portion has a net density of $2 \times 10^3\ \mathrm{kg/m^3}$. That will significantly increase the potential height of such a mountain. Add in all the other uncertainties (is Mauna Kea ...
22
The Cascade Mountain Range in the US Pacific Northwest is a good example to use to explain this. The predominant wind direction is from the West - over the Pacific Ocean. The air over the ocean picks up moisture from evaporation. After it passes the coast, the mountains cause the air to rise. As it does so it cools. Colder air can hold less water vapour than ...
17
According to one survey using GPS mounted on a plateau below the summit, Mount Everest is increasing its height approximately 4mm each year.
As for plate techtonics, this site describes it pretty simply:
Much like a car crashing head-on with a truck, crumpling occurred when the two continents met and the result was the creation of the Himalayan Mountains....
17
The Ural mountains are one of the oldest mountain ranges on Earth. They started forming about 300 Ma ago by the subduction of the oceanic crust once attached to the Kazakhstania plate under the ancient Laurussia continent. A subduction process that finished about 240 Ma ago.
The tectonic plates are far from fixed, some of them disappear over time other new ...
16
A clue is in the full name of the hill: 'Butte Montmartre'. A butte is an erosional feature in which a block of resistant rock overlies a less resistant layer. Erosion of the soft layer below causes the more resistant rock to erode as well by undercutting. This can lead to an isolated hill in a relatively flat surrounding.
The Montmartre hill itself ...
16
Here's how astronomers of the late 19th century thought the Moon would appear:
Recreations in Astronomy by H. D. Warren D. D., published in 1879, via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenography.
Here's what Apollo 15 astronauts saw:
Apollo 15 Lunar Module Falcon at the Hadley-Apennine landing site. Hadley Delta in the background rises approximately 4,000 ...
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Mountain ranges are usually formed as orogeny where tectonic plates collides, known as convergent boundaries.
The continental plates have less density than the oceanic plates and the buoyancy results in that they are mostly above sea level. Continental sea floor is known as continental shelf, but usually, it doesn't reach far from the coastline. Therefor ...
14
Factors determining the maximum possible height of mountains include the rate of uplift versus the rate of erosion[a] and rock strength.
Rock strength is controlled by the type and internal structure of the rock in question. There is some evidence that once mountains extend above the snow line, glacial and periglacial erosion have a stronger control than ...
14
Such forms tend to be created by glacial activity, which, ahem, the ice-covered continent is known for. Much discussion of this in the related question in Skeptics: Are there three pyramids in Antarctica?
Here's the generic answer in Wikipedia:
A pyramidal peak, sometimes in its most extreme form called a glacial
horn, is an angular, sharply pointed ...
13
According to the Oxford Dictionary of Earth Sciences,
seamount Isolated, submarine mountain rising more than 1000m above the ocean floor. The sharp, crested summits of seamounts are usually 1000-2000m below the ocean surface. Seamounts are of volcanic origin.
To avoid classifying seamounts by arbitrary sea level (dependent on availability of surface ...
13
Certainly there are such places. They are simply spots where the nearby rocks have a high concentration of magnetic minerals with a strong remanent magnetization. They're not necessarily literal hills: any kind of topography can be magnetized in this way. I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "drives your compass crazy" -- its direction will be affected, but ...
12
It's a glacier, it this case the Baltoro Glacier in Karakoram, Pakistan. The road-like pattern is formed as the glacier slowly flows towards lower altitude from a nearby ice-cap or accumulation zone. Rocks and dirt is transported both within the ice and on the surface.
With a closer look, the surface is rarely smooth, but often deep trenches, cravasses, ...
11
There does not appear to be an agreed international definition of a mountain.
In the UK there is a colloquial definition that a mountain must be "a thousand feet high". This definition is sufficiently firmly established in a "folklore" sense that the 1995 film "The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain" centred around it for its plot, and ...
11
Your calculation of maximum height has a precision of one significant figure, 10000 meters. That is consistent with the height of Mauna Kea to the same precision of one significant figure. The difference, 210 meters, doesn't matter. Your question doesn't really make sense the way you have stated it.
You need to propose a model, and do a calculation, ...
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The height of the Himalayas
Like Keith McClary says in his answer, there really are two factors in creating growing/shrinking mountains.
Mountains grow due to various reasons. In the case of the Himalayas it's like you must've seen in the documentary: the collision between the Indian and Eurasian continental plates. The material has to go somewhere and ...
10
I'll begin with your second question, as to how mountains erode.
To simplify things, there are two methods:
Physical weathering, where the rocks are broken down by weather. For example, there are cracks in rocks that get filled by water which freezes and expands. This maker the cracks bigger and breaks down the rock. Also wind, earthquakes and any other ...
10
This answers one of the questions you list, but the shallowest seamount, per this list on Wikipedia is Banua Wahu, which is 8 meters below the surface, but has risen above the surface and fallen below the surface several times in recorded history.
However, this is definitely not the tallest seamount, standing only 400m high from its base.
Edit
A larger ...
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The Himalayas are indeed rising, but they are also being eroded at a comparable rate. It will come as no surprise to anyone that the maximum possible height of a mountain on Earth is only marginally higher than Mt Everest, that is probably about 9000 to 10,000 metres high. There are, of course compressive / convergent plate boundaries where there is a ...
9
I suspect you are referring to the mesas and buttes dotted around the Karoo - the large semi-arid plateau that makes up much of South Africa's interior. These are a product of the glacial and geological history of the region. The flat hills are capped by hard, resistant dolerite. This is solidified lava that was forced between the horizontal strata of the ...
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Frost heaving of the striped variety
As soil freezes it expands, this slowly pushes coarser material outwards, (since no ice forms in the stones just between them). This forms in bands of coarse and fine material like you see in your image.
The effect only becomes more exaggerated as the soil gets more and more sorted, since the finer material holds more ...
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The other answer is already pretty good: No plate tectonics and no water erosion allows material to pile up in one place, and then stay put. Neither is the case on earth: The plate moves away from the hot spot, transporting built up rocks with it and causing the magma to find another outlet a few miles over. Hawaii also tends to be a place where you can see ...
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The largest database of seamounts contains over 33,000 seamounts and was created by Yesson, Chris; Clark, MR; Taylor, M; Rogers, AD. Link
For their list, they defined seamounts and knolls as
Seamounts and knolls are 'undersea mountains', the former rising more than 1000 m from the sea floor
Yesson, C et al. (2011): Lists of seamounts and knolls in ...
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I'll augment the other answer with an example. Consider a theoretical north-south oriented mountain range that rises 2000 m above sea level and the land on either side of the range is at sea level. A little ways west of the mountain is ocean. The location is the mid-latitudes and the prevailing wind is from the west.
Air along the surface travels above ...
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