Earth's Elevations Visualized
I'll seriously be stretching out the limits of my hosting service with this one.
Happy Tau Day everybody! (6/28) By pure coincidence, for this nerdy occasion I was already planning on uploading a previous data-visualization anyways, so hey, this works!
I have always been a big fan of scales, and being able to generally compare the sizes of things! And one thing I got particularly curious about was the altitude of things on the planet. It's very easy to hear things like "Mount Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth", or "The Mariana Trench is the deepest point in any of the Earth's Oceans" but it's not as easy to really internalize how high or deep they really are when you just hear the numbers.
So, inspired by things like The Scale of The Universe by Cary and Michael Huang, and — for this more specifically — the Deep Sea Poster by Kurzgesagt (plus its accompanying video), I created a poster that visualizes the altitude of a lot of things on Earth!
This is my largest project to date in terms of size, as it's a 1,024 x 10,240 px image, with each pixel being equal to 2 metres. I included over 40 locations, landmarks, and some other stuff.
To name most, I included the tallest point in every continent and deepest in every ocean, some other famous or notable mountains, some high up places, the tallest cliff in the world, some buildings, the tallest tree in the world, the lowest land in the world, some famous reefs and seas, and even some sea animals!
Due to the size of the image, which I am guessing will take up most of the space of this entry, I am putting it right here at the end! I also made a Spanish version.
I originally made this in June 2024, and it remains one of my favourite projects ever to this day! And — as I mentioned previously — undoubtedly my largest in terms of actual size of an image. Hope you enjoy!
Fun fact! 6.28 is not just for Tau, but also 6 and 28 are the two smallest perfect numbers! Yipee!
