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  • 3 months ago
Have you ever wondered which country is actually closest to space? 🌍 At first, it sounds simple - Mount Everest should win this title, right? Standing at nearly 9,000 meters above sea level, it's the highest point on our planet, sitting right on the border between Nepal 🇳🇵 and China 🇨🇳 It might seem like these two countries are the closest to space at the same time… but that's not quite true. The reason lies in the shape of our planet. Earth isn't a perfect sphere 🌐 it's slightly flattened at the poles and bulges at the equator due to its rotation. This makes the equatorial radius about 21 kilometers larger than the polar one And right on that line stands Mount Chimborazo 🌋 in Ecuador 🇪🇨 a magnificent volcano rising over 6,000 meters above sea level. While it's not the tallest mountain by elevation, its summit is the farthest point from the center of the Earth, even beating Everest by around 2 kilometers! So even though Everest is higher from sea level, the point on our planet that's truly closest to outer space… is in Ecuador 🌎

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Transcript
00:00Have you ever wondered which country is closest to space?
00:03Well, it seems simple.
00:05Or maybe not.
00:06Firstly, we need to find the highest point on the planet.
00:08And obviously that's Everest.
00:10At almost 9,000 meters above sea level, it's truly the roof of the world.
00:15The summit of Everest lies on the border between two countries,
00:18so the peak is technically split in half.
00:20The southern slope belongs to Nepal and the northern slope to China.
00:24So it seems that the countries closest to space are Nepal and China at the same time.
00:28But that's wrong.
00:30You see, our planet is not actually round.
00:32It's flat.
00:33Just kidding, but the Earth really is not a sphere.
00:36It's a geoid.
00:38Because of its rotation on its axis, a centrifugal force acts on the planet,
00:43stretching it at the equator and flattening it at the poles.
00:46And due to the complex terrain and uneven mass, it isn't a perfect ellipsoid.
00:50Here's an exaggerated model of what the Earth actually looks like,
00:53with its irregularities enlarged hundreds of times to make the distortions visible at this scale.
00:58The Earth's radius at the equator is 21 kilometers greater than at the poles.
01:03And now we need to find the highest point right on the equator.
01:06And there really is one, Mount Chimborazo,
01:09a volcano rising over 6,000 meters above sea level in Ecuador.
01:13And if we compare the distance from the center of the Earth to the summits of Everest and Chimborazo,
01:17we'll see that Chimborazo is 2 kilometers farther from the center,
01:21making Ecuador the closest country to space.
01:238ca인 14,000 ROOM
01:35545,000 ROOM
01:38A volcano from the center of the Señor
01:40The highestòmos is 1 Gobierno of the Mountain,
01:41the highest place,
01:42which means 2 minutes long in the middle,
01:44and between an across-isleuten between four to three degrees
01:45which means 2 minutes long in the north.
01:48ҁ gonna have 2 minutes long
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