Perhaps the most important curve of our times, Charles Keeling’s  curve shows the change in concentration of CO2 in the air with measurements taken every year for over 60 years. Taken at the top of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii because of its high altitude and relative isolation in the Pacific, Charles Keeling’s measurements show that the monthly average CO2 concentration in the air has risen from around 310 ppm (parts per million) to around 410 ppm in 2020. As a greenhouse gas this change in CO2 concentration is one of the critical causes of climate change.

The concentration varies seasonally as plants bloom in Spring and Summer reducing the concentration from its high around May as the CO2 has built up over the Norhern Hemisphere Winter.

The Scripps CO2 program is now overseen by Charles’ son Ralph Keeling.

The Keeling curve

Everyone knows Everest is the highest mountain at a colossal 8,848m above sea level. But, depending on how you’re measuring, there are two other candidates for tallest mountain.

Mauna Kea is a volcano on the big island of Hawaii. In fact the whole island is made from volcano, so as a peak it rises from the base of the Pacific ocean to over 4,200m above sea level. Including the part of the mountain that rises from the sea bed it is over 10,000m tall.

Mt Chimborazo can also lay a claim to the tallest mountain. The Earth is not a perfect sphere — it bulges around the Equator meaning that points on the Equator are several kilometres further from the centre of the Earth than points further North or South. A bulging around the centre is a common shape for a spinning sphere due to the force exerted by the spinning. Sitting almost exactly on the Equator means that Chimborazo’s already enormous 6,263m from sea level makes its summit the furthest point on the Earth’s surface from the centre of the Earth.

I’m not totally sure if that means that at some point Chimborazo’s summit makes it the closest point to the sun, but it definitely sounds plausible! 

The 3 tallest mountains

Caused by ash and rock interacting inside a cloud instead of ice particles. As you can imagine you can get this with volcanoes which can be pretty spectacular. Here’s more about how lightning forms inside a thunder cloud, the regular kind.

Dirty thunderstorm

Divergent (Mid-Atlantic ridge, The Rift Valley), Convergent (The Andes, The Himalayas) and Transform (San Andreas fault, Dead Sea Transform). There are some sub-varieties but these are the main ones. Which makes natural sense, so there’s no remembering to do, when you have two contacting plates - they can either be pushing together, pulling apart or rubbing past each other.

Incidentally, the idea that the giant continents move around all the time, enough to pull apart South America and Africa, and thrust up the Himalayas, obvious as it may seem now, was once not at all obvious. And if you stand on the ground in a big landscape, it’s kind of amazing to think of just what an amazing notion it was to propose. I read about it in Bill Bryson’s, A Short History of Nearly Everything for which I found a relevant excerpt online - The Earth Moves (pdf) - should you be interested in the characters that had the courage to seriously propose it.

Sketchplanations tagged with volcanoes