If we wanted to know the different layers that make up the Earth, either in a book or on the internet, we would find illustrations like this:
Or like this one:
Which will give us an idea of what the Earth is like inside, or at least what layers make it up. But what we definitely won’t have is an idea of how small a mountain is compared to the size of the Earth. And it is that, in the drawings shown, the size of the mountains is more or less between a twentieth (1/20) and a thirtieth (1/30) of the radius of the Earth. Here we will see that it is much less than that.
It should be remembered that, in a circle, the radius is the distance from its center to its edge and the diameter is a segment that joins two points on the edge of the circle passing through its center, as seen in the figure:
To have an idea more adjusted to reality, we are going to represent the Earth as a circle made with the edges of a cd. A cd has a radius of six centimeters. So, we are going to calculate what would be the height of the highest mountain on Earth (Mount Everest, with a height of 8,848 meters) in this circumference whose radius is 6 cm.
We can calculate the height of Everest in our drawing using the following ratio:
On the other hand, we have that the diameter of a human hair varies from 15 microns (very fine) to 170 microns (very thick), so we can say that 83 microns is very close to the average diameter of a human hair.
This means that, if we represent the Earth with a circumference of 6 cm. radio (one cd), Mount Everest would be the height of a human hair! No wonder it cannot be drawn to scale; We simply would not see it because even the thickness of the pen line used to draw the circumference is larger than the diameter of a human hair, as we can see in the following photo:
The ratio between the height of Everest and the radius of the Earth is 1/720; that means the radius of the earth is 720 times the height of mount Everest. And keep in mind that we are talking about the highest mountain on Earth. The following is a photo of Japan’s famous Mount Fuji. Its height is 3,776 meters. It’s not even half of Mount Everest.
REFERENCES: For the article: None. For photos: internet.
