Mt Everest Fact File
How Did Everest Form?
Mt Everest started to form about 60 million years ago when the dinosaurs still dominated the Earth. At that time, the Indo-Australian plate began moving northwards and about 50 million years ago, the Indian continent (carried by the Indo-Australian plate) started to collide with Eurasia. This began to squash and thicken the edges of the plates and the result of this massive collision was the buckling up of the land to form the Himalaya. This huge mountain range stretches approximately 2,414km (1,500 miles) and is home to the world’s highest mountains.
Mt Everest actually grows a few millimetres a year due to the immense geological forces that are still pushing the entire Himalaya mountain range upwards. Mt Everest is located precisely at Latitude 27° 59' North, Longitude 86° 56' East. The summit ridge separates Nepal and Tibet and is officially the highest border in the world.
The Name
In Nepal, Mt Everest carries the name Sagarmatha, which is Sanskrit for Forehead in the Sky. The name was chosen in the early 1960s when the Nepal government realised that Mount Everest did not have a Nepalese name. The Sherpa/Tibetan name, Chomolungma, was unacceptable. It was seen as contrary to the government’s efforts to complete a unification of Nepal. Among Tibetans and Sherpas, Mt Everest is still called Chomolungma or Qomolangma meaning Mother Goddess of the Earth or Mother of the Universe. The mountain was given its English name, Mount Everest, in 1865 by Andrew Waugh, then the British Surveyor-General of India. Waugh chose to name the mountain after his predecessor, George Everest, the former head of the Survey of India, first using the spelling Mont Everest and then Mount Everest.
Height
Radhanath Sikdar, an Indian mathematician and surveyor from Bengal, India, is credited as the first person to identify Mount Everest as the world's highest peak in 1852. Using trigonometric calculations based on measurements made with theodolites, Sikdar attained his height estimate from a distance of 150 miles away in India. Before Everest was surveyed and named it was known simply as Peak XV. The mountain is approximately 8,848m (29,035ft) high, although there is some variation in the measurements. K2 is second highest mountain at 8,611m (28,251ft).
In 2005, a Chinese Everest expedition climbed Mt Everest with GPS equipment to establish beyond doubt the mountain’s true altitude. On October 9 of that year, the Chinese State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping officially recorded the height of Everest at 8,844.43m ± 0.21 m (29,017.16 ± 0.69 ft). The Chinese claimed it was the most accurate measurement to date. This new height, however, was based on the actual highest point of rock and not on the snow and ice that covers it. The Chinese also measured a snow/ice depth of 3.5m.
Size Comparison - How Big is Everest?
Interestingly, the deepest place in the ocean is deeper than Everest is high: the Challenger Deep, located in the Mariana Trench. It's so deep that if Mt Everest was placed in it there would be more than 2km (1.25 miles) of water covering the summit.
While Mt Everest is the highest mountain in the world above sea level, the highest mountain actually is Mauna Kea in Hawaii. You can only see 4,205m (13,796ft) above sea level but the mountain rises 10,023m (33,476ft) from the sea floor. That is 1,355m (4,446ft) higher than Mt Everest.
To put it into perspective, the scaled image below shows some of the world's tallest buildings, including those that are still being constructed. The tallest building on the list, the Burj Dubai in Dubai, is due for completion in 2008 and is expected to be over 2,000ft tall. We can't put a picture of Mt Everest in at the same scale as the picture below because the top of the mountain would be just under a metre (just over three feet) above the top of your screen! You could stack 23 Empire State Buildings one on top of the other and still not quite make the summit of Everest.
NZ Schools join global interactive campaign to learn about Nepal and Everest while following the Rescue on Everest Challenge at www.rescueoneverest.org
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