THE VERTICAL PLANET

from the Challenger Deep to the summit of Everest · one scale, nothing compressed

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Formats: A4 · A3 · A2
What you get: Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject: science · school · comparison · classroom

All values are given from mean sea level. Only the vertical is to scale; the width of the section is schematic. The Challenger Deep is given from the 2021 pressure survey (−10 935 ± 6 m); the 2014 sonar survey gives −10 984 ± 25 m.

THE SUMMIT OF EVEREST IS AN OLD SEA FLOOR

The rock at the very top is Ordovician limestone, laid down on the floor of a warm shallow sea about 470 million years ago. Samples taken a few metres below the highest point on Earth contain fragments of trilobites, crinoids and shells.

The Indian plate drove into the Eurasian one, the sea between them closed, and its floor was pushed up. The highest land and the deepest water are two sides of the same process: where one plate dives beneath another a trench forms; where two meet head-on a range rises.

Everest is still rising by roughly four millimetres a year, faster than weather can wear it down — so the two ends of this vertical are slowly moving further apart.

On the sheet

All values are given from mean sea level. Only the vertical is to scale; the width of the section is schematic. The Challenger Deep is given from the 2021 pressure survey (−10 935 ± 6 m); the 2014 sonar survey gives −10 984 ± 25 m.
Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 9 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

THE VERTICAL PLANET

THE SUMMIT OF EVEREST IS AN OLD SEA FLOOR

On the sheet

Printing

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