#chimborazo

El Chimborazo.

🇪🇨 Mudflow in Alausí

⛰ On February 18, 2026, a mudflow struck the area of Alausí (Chimborazo Province, Ecuador).

Chimborazo is an amazing phenomenon - it's an extinct volcano in the Ecuadorean Andes

and while Everest is the highest mountain above sea level, Chimborazo is something else: because it's almost on the equator (and the earth is an oblate spheroid, which means it bulges around the middle), the peak of Chimborazo is the highest point (or as the wiki article says poetically, the utmost point) from the centre of the earth

and what this means is that if you go up there and then jump up and down, gravity is noticeably less than at sea level

we have always longed to do this - we're a wheelchair user now so we'd have to be airdropped, and our jumping up and down days are over, but we'd still love to see it and feel it - anyway we thought you'd like to know about it and look isn't it pretty

and the only reason we know about it is a very weird chain of events in which near the end of 2000, we were on a solitary retreat and over the course of three days had an entire novel dumped into our psyche out of nowhere, which made us go and look stuff up when we got home

this novel is never going to get finished because we just don't have the spoons, but we can tell you that one plot point concerns the head of Orpheus making its way from the greek islands (with the artist Augustus Earle) to the Beagle (Darwin's exploratory ship), getting left on one of the Galápagos islands by Darwin, taken to Ecuador by Melville (he of Moby-Dick), and then taken to England by Edward Whymper, the first white guy to climb Chimborazo - thus incidentally causing the eruption of Krakatoa (where Orpheus' genitals were being kept - it's an equilibrium thing)

an inactive volcano in the Ecuadorian Andes. Due to the geoid shape of the Earth, the diameter in the equatorial zone is the largest of the entire planet, so if the distance is measured from the center of the Earth, the top of Chimborazo is the most distant point, surpassing in more than two kilometres that of the highest mountain above sea level, Everest. Photo: Mateo Verani

Hello my little angels, have a good night!

Well, I guess on Monday I'll go to Guayaquil or I don't know where, I'll go for 10 days…

So I'll be dead, my children…So I hope you're happy :3…Goodbye

Take care of my cat :D