everest

Mount Everest's summit reaches 8,848.86 meters above sea level, measured in a joint 2020 China-Nepal survey using GPS and gravity data — 86 centimeters higher than the figure used for most of the 20th century. The floor of Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench sits 10,935 meters below sea level. The total measured vertical range of Earth's surface is therefore approximately 19,784 meters — about 19.8 kilometers from the lowest ocean floor to the highest mountain peak. Buried under 2.7 kilometers of Antarctic ice, the Denman Glacier trough reaches 3,500 meters below sea level: the deepest point on continental land, and the place where the next large ice loss could have catastrophic consequences.

Mount Everest is not the tallest mountain on Earth — and it is not the closest point on Earth's surface to outer space. Both claims belong to other peaks depending on how you define 'tallest.' At 8,848.86 meters (29,031.7 feet) above sea level, Everest wins the elevation contest. But Mauna Kea in Hawaii stands 10,210 meters (33,500 feet) from seafloor base to summit. And Chimborazo in Ecuador, a relatively modest 6,263 meters above sea level, sits 6,384.4 km from Earth's center — 2.1 km farther than Everest's summit.