Mount Everest

Mount Everest

Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world having an elevation of 8848 meters above the sea level. It lies in the Himalayan ranges on the Nepal Tibet border. Himalaya is a range of young fold mountains falling in India, Nepal and China (mostly in India). Fold Mountains are those which have been formed out of the movement of tectonic plates. When the plates collide, Fold Mountains appear in the form of giant wrinkles on the surface of earth. Himalayas are called the young fold mountains because they are still growing in height at a very pace.

A large number of rivers originate from the glaciers of the Himalaya, with Brahmaputra, Sutlej and Indus being the exceptions. These three rivers flow across the mountain range. The rivers actually existed much before the mountain range was formed. So the rivers never crossed the mountain by cutting stones to make its way, rather mountain adjusted itself to give the way to the river.

Before Mount Everest was discovered, Kanchenjunga was considered the highest mountain in the world. In 1847, a British Surveyor ‘Andrew Waugh’ noticed that another mountain far in the west from Kanchenjunga was even higher, but he couldn’t to reach there to calculate its actual height since foreigners were not allowed to enter inside Nepal and Tibet at that time. Due to this reason, they had to study the mountain from a distance of around 200 kilometers. Because of this distance, it took him and his team, several years to calculate the actual height. Finally in 1856, he declared the mountain to be 4880 meters which was 8 meters less than the present day data. This error was the result of refraction of light in the uneven weather conditions in the gap between the observation point and peak of the mountain, though he took care of all the conditions and did his best to eliminate all errors in the data and reach so close to the actual height. At that time, Sir Andrew Waugh wanted to keep the local and original name of the mountain, but he didn’t have the access to the local people at that time, so he couldn’t find its real name. For this reason, he named the mountain as Mount Everest on the name of his senior George Everest. The official Chinese name of Mount Everest was ‘Zumulangma’ and Tibetan name was ‘Qomolangma’. There have been many disputes about the name of Mount Everest. Sir George Everest opposed it first by saying that the Native Indians would not accept an English name. Later Chinese government proposed that mountain should be known as ‘Qomolangma’. In 1960, Nepali Government proposed another name ‘Sagarmatha’ but was not accepted.

There has always been a passion among the people to climb Everest and hundreds of people have lost their lives in the attempt, though a large number of people have succeeded too. Owing to its enormous height, the weather conditions on the mountain are extremely tough and become even tougher as the height increases. Explorers use bottles of oxygen to survive in the high pressure environment of Everest, but many have even made it to the peak without the oxygen bottle. Numerous Avalanches even worsen the climbing conditions. The first one to reach at the top of the mountain was the team of Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary in 1953.

The Mount Everest is one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the world.