Published in November 2024 as a paperback from Pedantic Press – The Relative Mountains of Earth: The Ribus. This pioneering book features all 7149 Ribus across all seven continents of the planet, along with photographs, articles and anecdotes from several contributors to the World Ribus project.
Welcome to the World Ribus website which contains a comprehensive list of every mountain in the world with a topographic prominence of 1000 metres or more. At last count, in January 2025, there are 7149 peaks across the world which qualify as Ribus. They are – necessarily – the 7149 most prominent peaks on Earth. The name ‘ribu’ (pronounced ree-boo🔊) comes from the Indonesian and Malay word meaning ‘thousand’.
Topographic prominence is perhaps the best way of identifying significant mountain peaks that are not merely subsidiary tops of some other higher peak. Therefore the chance of a great view at the top is considerable if summit vegetation does not prevent it. The concept is not explicitly part of the famous list of Scottish mountains over 3000 feet known as the Munros but later lists including the Corbetts, Grahams, Marilyns and Ultras all specify a minimum prominence, also known as drop or relative height. Just as Ultras are also known as P1500s (where P stands for prominence), Ribus are also known as P1000s.
This pioneering research project began in 2019 and is the result of the hard work of many individuals mentioned on the About page. For mountain heights, col elevations and summit and col locations we consulted every reliable source we could find, including traditional topographic maps, GPS readings, satellite data from digital elevation models (DEMs), the database created by Andrew Kirmse, publicly available previous research both online and offline including the list of the Ultra-prominent peaks, online map layers such as OpenTerrainMap (OTM), ArcGIS and Google Maps terrain view. Data quality varies greatly between different regions of the world and there will inevitably be many future updates.
Data is now available to view on regional pages, with mountains listed in order of prominence. Free downloads of the database are available here. The official paperback publication, The Relative Mountains of Earth: The Ribus, is available from November 27th 2024 via Pedantic Press. Media organizations are welcome to get in touch with custodian of the Ribus list Daniel Quinn via dan@gunung.org
In October 2024, work commenced on a similar project for the Moon in order to create a list of Lunar Ribus plus Negative Ribus (craters with a depth of 1000 metres or more). This has since expanded to cover Mercury, Mars, Ceres and Vesta. The likely title for the future publication is The Ribu Bagger’s Guide to the Solar System. Lead author Daniel Quinn is joined by collaborators Oscar Argudo and Jim Singh. You can track progress on this page. The Solar Systems research project is the second in a planned trilogy – the final volume will be on seamounts in Earth’s oceans but is not expected for at least a decade due to the current data accuracy limitations.