The world's longest above-water mountain range is the Andes, which is about 7,000 km long. The longest mountain range without qualification is the global mid-ocean ridge, which is a complex of mountain ranges on the seafloor. Its longest continuous range stretches to almost ten times the length of the Andes. Most mountain ranges are produced by the movement of tectonic plates, but while the above-water mountains are produced in what I imagine you take to be the intuitive way: as convergent plates move toward each other and buckle at the edge, the global mid-ocean ridge that so totally dwarfs the continental ranges is produced when divergent plates part, and the subterranean mass of Earth’s mantle swells up and out through the rift.
Agartha, the legendary kingdom in the centre of a hollow Earth, gestures at the immensity of our terrestrial volume by positing a place somewhere in its tunnels of sky called the centre of gravity, where the winds of gravity change. There is, to a modern human, nothing more immense than open sky. But it is important that we make this qualification: that our audience is the modern human, because Agartha is essentially a Victorian invention. It was invented from whole cloth in the 1870s by a French colonial official in India, and the fancy of a lost city spoken of in impossibly old Brahmin texts is an essentially orientalist one. In Sunn O)))’s album Monoliths and Dimensions, the opening seventeen minute track includes a spoken word part which recasts Agartha in the frozen winds of a mythical extreme north. It conjures a false history, and we slip into something like an Iceland or a Svalbard where increasing distance never becomes recurrence, but just more and more distance; further and further from home. Csihar Attila’s monologue, itself sounding like a groaning glacier, describes the centre of the Earth as a knotted sky, a third pole, a secret distance of further north past the point when north becomes south.
The tallest overground trees are the coast redwoods, which stand at around 110 metres. The tallest trees without qualification are the subterranean megalithic pillars under the Antarctic ice. When Antarctica formed part of the global supercontinent of Pangea, it was covered with a dense forest of pines, and the last of these trees remain preserved under the ice. They are hundreds of millions of years old, and died long before the alps were formed. These undead trees, older than mountains, have been petrified. Rapid cooling and burial under kilometres of ice fossilised the wood and replaced much of the carbon with silicon, nitrogen, and calcium. Due to the difference in pressure between the deepest levels of the ice and the surface ice the trees were artificially stretched so that the roots remain buried in the rock 4,000 metres down while the highest branches can be found only a few tens of metres below the surface of the ice. These invisible trees, if they were stood above ground, would tower over anything humans have ever built and approach the highest mountains of the Alps or the Rockies. The ice easily and totally envelopes them.
Humans have very recently begun to fly and build tall structures, but for nine tenths of our species’ existence we navigated the surface of the Earth essentially as if it were a two-dimensional manifold. The surface of the Earth may be wrinkled and gorged—it is embedded in three-dimensional space—but we moved over it as an ant would move over the surface of a lumpy peach. The cardinal directions dictated our plane of possible translation, and up and down were not directions we could travel in but spatial metaphors for cosmogonic changes of state. Upward towards heaven or downward into hell.
Arnold Schoenberg's String Quartets: The Weight of an Alp
Homeomorphism
The Absurdity of a Net