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
Comments