The size of Mt. Meru?

Flagg

Flagg

The Most Electrifying Man in Sports Entertainment
We know it's 600 miles at the summit. Any references to its width, circumference, or area at the base? Page refs?
 
I was bored today, so I decided to run some numbers on Meru to help put into perspective just how massive it is.


The only known quantity is its height: 600 miles. If one assumes that the drawing from the map is proportional, the width of the mountain's base is approximately 780 miles. I also assumed that the mountain is roughly canonical in shape, and also has the same overall density as granite (5,938 kg per cubic meter).

Code: 
Circumference : 3,941 kilometers (2,443 miles)
Basal Area    : 1,236,788 square kilometers (469,979 sq. miles)
Volume        : 397,833,473,333 cubic meters (517,183,515,332 cubic yards)
Weight        : 2,359,152,496,864 metric tons (2,595,067,746,550 tons)
Slope         : 1.53

I wrote a script to do these calculations, so it will be easy to plug in other values if my basic assumptions about basal width and density are wrong -- In fact, I'm almost certain they are:


Some unknown portion of the mountain's makeup is undoubtedly white jade, which has an unknown density. The densest form of "rock" on Earth is diamond, at approximately 7734 kg per cubic foot. If we assume that the mountain is pure white jade and that white jade has the same density as diamond, then the weight looks like this instead:

Code: 
Weight        : 3,076,844,082,757 metric tons (3,384,528,491,032 tons)

So, the actual weight of Meru (that is, the portion that's above ground level) would be somewhere in between the two figures, unless of course white jade is denser than diamond. Then it's anybody's guess.


Nerdy enough for you?
 
It only took me about 30 mins to write the script, and most of that was looking up conversions from metric to imperial.


Another baffling fact is that the tallest mountain on Earth, Everest, is 8.8 kilometers, where Meru is 965. The cloud layer on Earth is what? 5-10km?
 
Flagg said:
We know it's 600 miles at the summit. Any references to its width, circumference, or area at the base? Page refs?
Click to expand...
Where's the height mentioned? I've never read anything about it.
 
I believe it was first mentioned in Tomb of the Five Corners where it describes Meru being half way up the mountain at 300 miles. Since then it's been confirmed by other sources, IIRC, but I don't have a page reference for you.
 
Flagg said:
I believe it was first mentioned in Tomb of the Five Corners where it describes Meru being half way up the mountain at 300 miles. Since then it's been confirmed by other sources, IIRC, but I don't have a page reference for you.
Click to expand...
That might refer to how far you have to travel to get up there, though. So it'd be the side of the cone that's 600 miles long, not the height.
 
That's possible. However, the official wiki says it stands "600 miles above the ground". That sounds like vertical distance to me.
 
soul tank? the one Autocthon loaded up from before cheesing it?


cool, I didn't know that was mount meru. makes sense though
 
Almost every thread I've read about it on other forums, including White Wolf's, have accepted the height being 600 miles.
 
Flagg said:
I believe it was first mentioned in Tomb of the Five Corners where it describes Meru being half way up the mountain at 300 miles. Since then it's been confirmed by other sources, IIRC, but I don't have a page reference for you.
Click to expand...
DotFA kinda throws a hitch in that since IIRC the city of Meru is described as pretty much covering the entire mountain. Throw in the Zenith ring being fairly close to the top and a lot of underground parts of the city and I at least start to find the 600mile high figure harder and harder to work with even for an over-the-top anything awesome goes game like Exalted.
 
WW in general, and Exalted in particular, has a tradition of writers making new shit up that doesn't take established facts into consideration.


A city covering the entire surface area of a 600 mile high mountain is indeed retarded.
 
Flagg said:
WW in general, and Exalted in particular, has a tradition of writers making new shit up that doesn't take established facts into consideration.
A city covering the entire surface area of a 600 mile high mountain is indeed retarded.
Click to expand...
I couldn't agree with you more...on both counts ;)
 
And yet Yu-Shan, a city which covers the space of an entire continent, is totally feasible.
 
But before the primordial war it was the Blessed Isle that housed the gods. Thus, I would have expected there to be an equally ridiculous living/administrative space there even before the Exalted moved themselves over.


I don't think it's so unfeasible that the first city of the First Age should cover a mountain 600 miles high. Well, obviously it is unfeasible, but unfeasible is how the First Age rolls. Remember that it wouldn't be like one of our own cities. There would be a great deal of spare space around the place filled with hanging gardens and plazas and very broad streets and so on, to ensure it doesn't feel at all confining. And a significant fraction of the mountain's surface area would probably be left unsettled so as to avoid upsetting the geomancy. Consider the scale of each individual building, too; one of Meru's great libraries, for example, would probably occupy the space of a town in itself.
 
I agree with Jukashi in that matter. Rant about the fact that Meru is too big is like ranting about Titans being too heavy to fly or Heavenly Guardian Defense to absurd to have effect.


Also, the Blessed Isle chapter in DotFA implies that there are large parts of Mount Meru that are empty or partially empty. I'll get the page reference later, but there is a sentence more or less like this "Some Lunars, for example, prefer living in the middle areas between the city and the base of the mountain to avoid the confinement feeling Meru may give". It also says that parts of the Mountain are used as hunting areas, and that there are other parts still that are used for extracting minerals (including "high peaks" where Sidereals mine Starmetal).
 
That makes a lot of sense. Kings and Queens naturally want hunting reserves, parks, gardens, and other things... Sort of like the mountain top being the metropolis of Meru, while many different counties and subdivisions join together under its collective name. I'm sure that some whizzing conveyance was also commonplace to allow for ease of travel around the gigantor city.
 
So, if you can calculate the circumferance, what is the surface area of the mountian, assuming the height at 600 miles? My math-fu is too weak to take on that challenge.
 
Based on my initial figures, the surface area would be approx. 875,589 square miles (2,267,765 square km).


That's about a third larger than the size of Alaska.


Edit: It's about 40,000 sq. miles larger than Greenland.
 
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