What is it about?
We ran a computer calculation over terrain data for the whole world, found every mountain, and calculated each mountain's isolation and prominence values. In order to do this, we also needed to make extensive improvements to existing terrain data to clean up their errors.
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Why is it important?
This is the first-ever calculation of the prominence of every hill and mountain in the world. Prominence is the most important measure of what makes a mountain a mountain, rather than just a small hill or subsidiary peak. This research identified over 1.6 million mountains, including 13 very large ultra-prominence mountains that had never been classified before. The same algorithms presented in this paper can be used in the future as the collection of terrain data improves. The terrain data we constructed is the first worldwide database with substantially all major errors removed, and a high resolution.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Calculating the prominence and isolation of every mountain in the world, Progress in Physical Geography Earth and Environment, October 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0309133317738163.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Online summary of algorithm
An informal description of how the prominence algorithm works, and a summary of the main results.
C++ code
The code we wrote to perform the isolation and prominence calculations.
Terrain data
The terrain data we prepared to make the calculations accurate.
Downloadable version of the paper
A downloadable PDF version of the paper.
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
