@wangxueying

The summit of Chimborazo, in Ecuador, holds the interesting distinction of being the farthest point from the center of the Earth. If you are confused, I understand. After all, shouldn’t that be the same as the highest elevation since the Earth is a sphere? As it happens, the Earth is not actually spherical. The centrifugal force of its spin gives it a significant bulge around the equator. In other words, if you shrunk the Earth down to the size of a desktop globe and measured its circumference, you would find that if you stretched your measuring tape around the equator, it would be noticably larger than if you wrapped it from pole to pole. Chimborazo stands at only a single degree of latitude below the Equator, making its peak very slightly (about 2 km) further from the center of the Earth than Everest’s. Here is a super-duper scientific image to demonstrate the difference:

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