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Mont Blanc
The white mountain, highest summit of the Alps
Mont Blanc, the White Mountain, is the highest peak in the Alps and in Western Europe, a great dome of snow and ice rising to 4,806 metres on the frontier between France and Italy. From the resort town of Chamonix at its foot, the massif presents a wall of glaciers, aiguilles, and seracs that effectively gave birth to the sport of mountaineering. Its rounded summit, often plumed with blown snow, has been a fixture of the European imagination since the Enlightenment.
The Mont Blanc massif is a block of ancient crystalline rock - granite and gneiss - shoved upward and sculpted by glaciers during the Alpine orogeny, the same slow collision of the African and European plates that raised the whole range. Glaciers such as the Mer de Glace pour from its flanks, though they are retreating year by year as the climate warms. The exact summit height shifts slightly each year with the depth of the snowcap, so surveyors re-measure it regularly. Beneath the mountain, an 11-kilometre road tunnel links France and Italy.
The first ascent, on 8 August 1786 by Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard, is often taken as the founding moment of alpinism, spurred by a prize offered by the scientist Horace-Benedict de Saussure. Chamonix grew into one of the world's great mountain towns and hosted the first Winter Olympics in 1924. The summit is shared, with some lingering dispute, between France and Italy, and the massif draws climbers, skiers, and trail runners - among them the competitors of the famous Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc.