My friend Andrew Berry, who teaches and advises biology undergraduates at Harvard, called my attention to a piece he wrote about an evolutionary biologist (one about whom Andrew’s compiled a book) and the (claimed) highest mountain in the world. It’s a nice story and an interesting one. It’s also on someone else’s website, so I’ll just refer you to the story at Science Whys, “Biology’s Sherlock Holmes: The strange case of the evolutionist and the highest mountain in the world.”
A teaser: Mount Hercules, discovered by Captain J. A. Lawson in New Guinea in 1875, and estimated by him to be 32,000 feet high (3000 feet higher than Mount Everest). See who debunked him!
An excellent way to introduce the “Biology’s Sherlock Holmes” post – and that too is an excellent read.
Apparently nature was queerer than Lawson supposed.
Highest physically possible mountain on earth might be about 15 km high…
How tall can mountains get?
That’s a terrific video, thanks! It’s kind of funny, my brother and I were talking about plate tectonics just last night.
Back to the original post, I’d like to read more of Andrew Berry’s work, he seems to have a very approachable style. More books on the pile than time… 🙂
Important to note that Everest is NOT the highest mountain on earth. The real champ is my neighbor, Chimborazo, which is the highest point on earth as measured from the earth’s center.
No no no! It’s Mauna Kea in Hawaii. 33000ft from the mudline to the summit. OK- so the mudline is 19-odd thousand feet below sea level, but sea level is a variable anyway, so why count from that?
Very interesting article – do yourself a favour and click through. 🙂
A veritable Mount Improbable.
Well, not particularly implausible. The Carstensz Pyramid (now known as Puncak Jaya) is a pretty substantial mountain, and the first ascent (1962) by Heinrich Harrer (and team) was a pretty fraught affair because of the isolation of the mountain. His book, titled “I come from the Stone Age” hints at the pleasures. It retains it’s reputation as being harder than it’s height implies.
For what it’s worth, until the development of satellite technology, the only ways to accurately know the height of a mountain was to either survey in from a coast (an unending joy anywhere in the tropics, with or without added headhunters), or climb to the summit of the mountain and determine the boiling point of water – which then needed correction for local weather conditions. There are numerous tales of minor and major epics of exploration as people struggled to get the stove to light in a raging hurricane as the night fell; inevitably this was two dunes beyond the death of the last camel and several Sherpas lay dead in the Icefall. But for that all-important datum, fingers and people died.
But, good one on Wallace for catching the bullshitter, when he should have been serving echidna turds.
Great story about Wallace, one of my heroes. I left this comment on that site:
For another incredible story investigated by Wallace, see his last chapter in Richard Spruce’s Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes (available online free of charge). There he discusses perhaps the greatest treasure legend in the world, the vast treasure of the last Inca ruler, Atahualpa. Richard Spruce, one of the greatest Victorian explorer/naturalists, had uncovered a document written by someone named Valverde on his deathbed in Spain. Valverde had lived in Ecuador and claimed to have learned of the treasure’s location in the Llanganates Mountains. His document explained to the Spanish king how to get to the treasure.
Unlike Lawson, Valverde got all the biology right, and both Spruce and Wallace became convinced that this document was genuine. In fact, unbeknownst to Wallace or Spruce, a Quechua plant name in Valverde’s document, “Sanguirima”, referred to a very distinctive plant (genus Espeletia) that was not discovered in the Llanganates until the 1930s (Spruce guessed incorrectly that the word might refer to a white-leaved cecropia tree). So Valverde’s story was not only scientifically accurate at the time it was written, it even had predictive value.
Oops, Sanguirima -> Sangurima
Also “not discovered” -> “not discovered by Europeans”
I spent the summer of 1999 in the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. While the highlands are, as their name suggests, high–its capital, Goroka, is 5,072 feet above sea level–Mount Michael, their highest peak, is tall (12,303 feet) but nowhere near the pseudo-geological heights of Mount Hercules and neither is the highest point in all of New Guinea, Puncak Jaya at 16,024 feet.
That said, I can readily imagine the intrigue, temptation, and possibility for dubious claims of discovery in Lawson and Wallace’s 1875, for New Guinea is mysterious, and some of its peaks are unmapped even today. Picture yourself hiking up out of the Grand Canyon with the aerobic challenge of the turning switchbacks and miles of steep demands on your muscles and knees, but now replace the sandstone terraces with muddy rainforest and dense, vision-blocking fog. At the end of each day of hiking, there’s a village but then another hidden summit around another lush switchback.
The idea of a herd of buffalo is laughably absurd. Go Wallace!
Sadly, I didn’t spy a single endemic mammal in the wild when in PNG, though there were tree kangaroos in Goroka.
Maybe someone can find an Open Source site for this one at http://www.jstor.org/stable/41426156?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
This paper, PSEUDOTSUGA MACROCARPA IN BAJA CALIFORNIA, tells an interesting tale about a sequence of papers that perpetuate a misunderstanding about plant distribution possibly caused by copying an error. This tree’s southernmost distribution is in the USA, but was repeatedly reported in Baja Calfornia, Mexico because of a similarity in place names complicated by the fact that the one in California, USA had long gone out of popular use.
A lot of people spent a lot of time looking for it in Baja California in vain because of the error. If I remember correctly (I haven’t read the paper in years), a little field work would have prevented the error, but that would require, as some did, getting out of the office and actually going into the field to fatten one’s vitae.
The author of the referenced paper, Richard Minnich, not only did the field work, he combed the catacombs and unraveled the mystery. Real scholarship!