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Himalayas
The planet's highest mountain system, a 2,400-km wall between the subcontinent and Tibet
No other range comes close. The Himalayas hold all fourteen of Earth's peaks above 8,000 metres, including Everest, and more than a hundred summits clear 7,200 metres. The name comes from Sanskrit for abode of snow, and from the Gangetic plain the white crest seems to float above the haze, a barrier so vast it shapes the monsoon and gives birth to the rivers that feed nearly two billion people. To stand at its foot is to feel the scale of a collision still under way.
The range is young and still rising, thrust up where the Indian plate drives north into Eurasia at roughly four to five centimetres a year, a slow-motion crash that began around fifty million years ago. The result is a stacked sequence of folded marine sediments, gneiss, and granite, with seashell fossils now lying near the summits. The arc runs west-northwest to east-southeast for about 2,400 kilometres across Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China, its glaciers and snowfields the source of the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra. Earthquakes are frequent and sometimes catastrophic.
For Hindus and Buddhists the Himalayas are sacred ground, dwelling of gods and the setting of pilgrimage routes that predate written history. Sherpa communities in the Nepalese high valleys became indispensable to the mountaineering era that opened with the 1953 Everest ascent, and today a tide of trekkers and climbers sustains and strains the region. Glacial retreat threatens the dry-season flow of the great rivers, while the same tectonic energy that built the range keeps the population beneath it exposed to seismic risk.