For decades, adventurers have clawed up Mount Everest to proclaim they’d scaled the planet’s highest peak. Some have died trying. But now we learn that by at least one measure Everest isn’t the pinnacle. That title belongs to Ecuador’s Chimborazo in the Andes.

How can Chimborazo actually be taller than Everest? Two reasons:

First, it depends on what you measure from. Second, because we live on a fat Earth. Earth isn’t perfectly round. It’s an oblate spheroid, meaning it bulges a bit more at its midsection.

For those reasons, if you measure the height of a mountain from the center of Earth, not from its altitude above sea, Chimborazo beats Everest. The Ecuadorean peak rises from the center of Earth to a tape-measure-busting 3,967 miles, according to geology.com. That eclipses Everest by about 1.2 miles.

Of course, measured from sea level as most of us who live on the surface of the planet do, Chimborazo tops out at about 20,500 feet, far short of Everest’s 29,035 feet.

But to all those adventurers who risk life and wallet to climb Everest: We hear the doubt creeping into your minds. Sure, you’ve faced the icy doom of Everest, graveyard for so many climbers. Maybe you’ve clomped around at the “top of the world.”

But ... is it really the top? Don’t you now have to make the admittedly less arduous climb of Chimborazo to have full bragging rights? Or even Mauna Kea, which is on the Big Island of Hawaii, and, if measured from its ocean bottom is, yes, taller than Everest.

Will we now see a stampede to the Ecuador peak or Mauna Kea? Maybe, but we also note that the same human behavioral factors could come into play here as in the more mundane task of dieting to lose weight. That is, people could cheat.

Several months ago, Dinesh and Tarakeshwari Rathrod declared that they’d achieved a lifelong goal of becoming the first Indian couple to summit Everest. But then came word that Nepalese authorities had their doubts about the Rathrods, both police officers in India, The New York Times reports. The authorities said the photographs the couple submitted as proof to the government to notch a certificate — why climb Everest if there’s no trophy? — were doctored. The duo is now banned from climbing Nepal’s mountains for 10 years, which is probably fine with them since they apparently didn’t do all that much climbing in the first place.

Sure, reality is slippery. But we’re sticking with Everest as the world’s tallest. Because you don’t climb a mountain starting at the center of Earth or the bottom of the ocean. You start from the base. Step by step. Climbers of Chimborazo or Mauna Kea can boast that they’ve conquered the world’s highest peak. But we doubt it will supplant Everest in the fantasies of adventurers, no matter how fat Earth gets.

Not really!