[ganeshkrishnan]

Big Island is an extremely interesting place. Its just few kilometers wide but it has around 8 climate zones ranging from snow, desert, volcano, tropical, beaches, rainforest what not. You can drive less than an hour and go from desert to snow and snow to tropical.

There is one public bus that goes around and once I was the only passenger and the driver stopped the bus near the ocean to show the travelling whales/dolphins.

[WillPostForFood]

You must be thinking of a different island. Hawaii, the Big Island is big. 93 miles long, 76 miles wide. Maui has a narrow waist (an isthmus connecting two volcanos), 6 miles across.

[gottorf]

This description still applies to Big Island (if we stretch it a bit):

> You can drive less than an hour and go from desert to snow and snow to tropical.

You can drive from the beach on the leeward side, going past dry ranchland with an average annual rainfall of ~10-15" (similar to arid West Texas places like Midland), to the Mauna Kea Observatory, where snow can sometimes be found, in under an hour and a half; and from there across to the windward side, back to the beach at Hilo, with about 10 feet of rain a year, in another hour and 15 minutes or so.

Truly wild and must be seen to be believed.

[magicalhippo]

We did a tour to Mauna Kea and watched the sunset from above the cloud layer. It was spectacular.

And as you say, snow, whereas we'd been on the beach just a couple of hours before. Guide didn't drive straight up due to acclimatization and I still got slightly dizzy up there, it's over 4200m (13800 ft) up there after all.

While the Big Island is certainly much larger than the other Hawaiian islands, it's not huge. We did day trips covering about a third of the island, including multiple tourist-y stops. And yea the nature there kept surprising us again and again.

[jebarker]

Also the tallest mountain on Earth!

[aoki]

For those downvoting: As measured from the planetary surface(=sea floor in this case), as opposed to sea level

[tele_ski]

I've always thought that it seems like a silly way to measure it.. Everest also goes to the sea floor, technically.

[perihelions]

Everything is silly, and consensus reality on these kind of things is just a glorified Reddit thread IRL. There's at least four plausible metrics. Everest is tallest from the local mean sea level (the smoothed gravitational equipotential—what a stationary water surface hugs); McKinley-Denali from its local terrain base; Mauna Kea from the local terrain base inclusive of underwater terrain; and Chimborazo, in equatorial Ecuador (it's Ecuador because it's equatorial), as measured from this planet's center-of-mass (the planet bulges out approaching the equator because of its spinning—"oblateness").

Like a Reddit thread, it's best not to argue too much with what the hive-mind decides. People literally died climbing what they believed to be the correct answer. Let them have their thing. :)

[dredmorbius]

Following up on your pedantism: Chimborazo isn't in Ecuador because it's equatorial, but rather, it's equatorial because it's in Ecuador.

(Or, perhaps, because it lies near or on the equator.)

There are non-Ecuadorian equatorial locations.

:-)

(I do like, appreciate, and was previously aware of the various claims to "highest mountain". Interesting also to contemplate that the early Rockies, and perhaps Appalachian mountains (themselves older than dirt, literally), may once have exceeded thirty thousand feet (approaching 10,000 m). Though the Rockies figure might be an ambitious reading of the Teton Fault having experienced 20,000 -- 30,000 feet of vertical displacement. This is possible without peaks reaching such heights, given erosion. Estimates of the original height of the Appalachians is even more tenuous and indirect.)

[tracerbulletx]

Enjoyed your clear description but I don't know that framing it as some kind of hive mind group think issue is that accurate. It's just taxonomy and ontology, it's ok to have different taxonomies for different contexts. The same issue exists for everything. planets, temperature, oceans, species..

[brtio2]

What is being called hive mind, that used to be called cargo cult, is a real thing on HN, though.

There’s this fantasy that there are a bunch of geniuses that can adequately cover any topic here and that discussion will be inclusive and enlightening, but, no, it’s just a frustrating cauldron of wannabes and bad info that periodically hit upon things.

[RHSman2]

Humans measuring stuff and getting pedantic is a sport for the ages.

[whycome]

So I’m not supposed to measure it from my belly button? ..,

But really, is there a “highest point on earth”? That takes into account all the variations of land. Would it work if earth isn’t a perfect sphere?

[eesmith]

Shout out to Chimborazo, where the summit is (likely) furthest from the center of the Earth. (I understand Huascarán is in contention, and don't know the latest details.)

[jebarker]

Then you’d be calling a whole continent a single mountain and it wouldn’t be a continuous slope in one direction.

I agree though that it’s a bit silly to measure Mauna Kea to the ocean floor.

[gottorf]

It feels like it makes a bit more sense with Mauna Kea, since Big Island is just five shield volcanoes in a trenchcoat, and the point where the land meets the ocean is basically just the foothills of the mountains. You cannot say that of Everest, which is over 400 miles from the nearest ocean.

[sejje]

How does the rain avoid the desert areas?

[xKingfisher]

It's a "rain shadow"[0]

The predominant wind is from the east, and the air cools aid forms rainclouds as it tries to rise over the mountains in the center of the island. Then warms again as it descends down the eastern slopes.

So the eastern (Hilo) side is pretty lush jungle, and the west(Kona) is desert. With snowy mountains in between.

[0]https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/rain-s...

[magicalhippo]

It's interesting to see the transition. Lush green grass and vegetation on your left, and as you turn your head right, it goes more yellow and then completely dry desert on your right.

It's almost like you can see the line across the terrain.

[Ifkaluva]

Probably rain shadow due to the mountains

[nottorp]

It checks the biome type like in Minecraft!