Heaviest Object on Earth

Heaviest Object on Earth Weighs 116B Pounds

China's Great Wall will probably always be man's heaviest structure

By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff

The Great Wall of China is estimated to be the heaviest item on Earth—by quite a bit.   (Getty Images/bjdlzx)

(NEWSER) – Some things (death, taxes) are unavoidable; others are simply immovable. The heaviest objects in the world have been rated by 24/7 Wall St., which examined the numbers based on sources such as Guinness World Records, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and various travel, science, and engineering sources.


Note that almost all of the world's most massive items were crafted by humans, and that many that approach the top of the list are based on estimates alone. The heaviest item that has been directly weighed, per Guinness: the rotating service structure for one of the launch pads at Kennedy Space Center, coming in at close to 4.9 million pounds. Here are the top 10 heaviest objects and their weights:

1. Great Wall of China; 116 billion pounds
2. Three Gorges Dam (China); 20.8 billion pounds
3. Great Pyramid of Khufu (Egypt); 12 billion pounds
4. Gullfaks C installation oil storage facility (North Sea); 3 billion pounds
5. SSCV Thialf crane vessel (various); 2.1 billion pounds
6. Palace of the Parliament (Bucharest, Romania); 1.6 billion pounds
7. Nimitz Class aircraft carrier (various); 204 million pounds
8. Freight train (Western Australia); 199.5 million pounds
9. Submerged communications cable (under oceans); 176.4 million pounds
10. Washington Monument (Washington, DC); 162.2 million pounds