Chimborazo

Mount Everest is the highest mountain above sea level, but the summit of Chimborazo, an ice-capped volcano in Ecuador, is the point on Earth's surface farthest from the planet's center. The reason is shape. Earth spins, so it bulges at the equator, and Chimborazo stands just one and a half degrees south of it. Its peak, 6,263 meters above sea level, lies about 6,384 kilometers from Earth's center, roughly 2 kilometers farther out than the top of Everest. By that measure it is the place on solid ground closest to the stars. For many Ecuadorians it is simply Taita Chimborazo, Father Chimborazo, a mountain woven into Andean tradition.

Chimborazo rises from the western range of the Ecuadorian Andes, in Chimborazo Province, about 150 kilometers south-southwest of Quito and near the city of Riobamba. It is a broad stratovolcano with several summits, the highest named Whymper, followed by Veintimilla at about 6,234 meters. Glaciers cover its upper slopes, though they have thinned and retreated in recent decades, a loss linked to warming and to ash from nearby Tungurahua volcano. The lower slopes are high grassland, or páramo, protected in the Chimborazo Fauna Production Reserve, where vicuñas graze alongside llamas and alpacas. Its last known eruption is dated to about 550 CE, and it is considered inactive rather than extinct.

For a time Chimborazo was thought to be the tallest mountain in the world. In 1802 Alexander von Humboldt, Aimé Bonpland and the Ecuadorian Carlos Montúfar climbed to about 5,875 meters before altitude sickness turned them back, a height no European was then known to have reached, and Humboldt's study of how plants change with elevation on its slopes helped found the science of biogeography. The English climber Edward Whymper made the first ascent with the Italian guides Jean-Antoine and Louis Carrel on January 4, 1880. Ice harvesters known as hieleros long cut glacier ice to sell in local markets, a trade now kept alive by very few. Today climbers come for the summit and scientists for the shrinking glaciers that feed the farms below.

• Cotopaxi
  Ecuador's near-perfect glaciated cone, among the world's highest active volcanoes fellow Ecuadorian volcano
• Mount Everest
  Earth's highest mountain, the crown of the Himalaya on the Nepal-Tibet border higher above sea level but nearer Earth's center
• Ecuador
  The equator, the Andes, and the Galápagos located in
• Andes
  The world's longest continental mountain range, the 7,000-km spine of South America part of
• The Ring of Fire
  The Pacific rim of subduction, where the ground does not hold still part of
• Quito
  Ecuador's capital, a colonial jewel high in the Andes south-southwest of