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Mount Everest
Earth's highest mountain, the crown of the Himalaya on the Nepal-Tibet border
No point on Earth's surface reaches higher into the sky than the summit of Everest, where the jet stream scours bare rock at 8,849 metres and the air holds a third of the oxygen found at sea level. Straddling the frontier between Nepal and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, the peak the Nepalese call Sagarmatha and Tibetans call Chomolungma is a pyramid of pale Ordovician limestone, its topmost band laid down on an ancient seafloor before the Indian and Eurasian plates collided and heaved it skyward.
Everest sits within the Mahalangur section of the Himalaya, a wall of giants thrown up over the past fifty million years as the Indian subcontinent ploughs north into Asia at roughly four centimetres a year, lifting the summit a few millimetres higher each season. Three great faces - the Southwest, the North, and the seldom-climbed Kangshung - rise above glaciers that calve into the Khumbu Icefall, a treacherous river of shifting seracs. Above 8,000 metres lies the so-called death zone, where the human body deteriorates faster than it can recover and winds can exceed 200 kilometres an hour.
The first confirmed ascent came on 29 May 1953, when Edmund Hillary and the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay reached the top via the South Col. Since then thousands have followed, and the mountain has become both a magnet and a mirror - drawing record-seekers, raising hard questions about overcrowding, commercialisation, and the labour of the Sherpa guides who fix the ropes and carry the loads. Sagarmatha National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, protects its lower flanks, while melting glaciers and the bodies of the fallen mark the costs of its allure.