NASA Earth Observatory image: Sagarmatha: “mother of the universe”

Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using EO-1 ALI data from the NASA EO-1 team, archived on the USGS Earth Explorer.

Fourteen mountain peaks on Earth stand taller than 8,000 meters (26,247 feet).

The tallest of these “eight-thousanders” is Mount Everest, the standard to which all other mountains are compared.

The Nepalese name for the mountain is Sagarmatha: “mother of the universe.”

Everest’s geological story began 40 million years ago when the Indian subcontinent began a slow-motion collision with Asia.

John McPhee

The edges of two continents jammed together and pushed up the massive ridges that make up the Himalayas today.

Pulitzer-winning journalist John McPhee summed up the wonder of the mountain’s history when he wrote Annals of the Former World:

"The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the Earth. If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence; this is the one I would choose."

In other words, when climbers reach the top of Mount Everest, they are not standing on hard igneous rock produced by volcanoes.

Rather, they are perched on softer sedimentary rock formed by the skeletons of creatures that lived in a warm ocean off the northern coast of India tens of millions of years ago.

Meanwhile, glaciers have chiseled Mount Everest’s summit into a huge, triangular pyramid, defined by three faces and three ridges that extend to the northeast, southeast, and northwest.

Edmund Hillary

The southeastern ridge is the most widely used climbing route. It is the one that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay followed in May 1953 when they became the first climbers to reach the summit and return safely.

Despite its reputation as an extremely dangerous mountain, commercial guiding has done much to tame Everest in the last few decades.

As of March 2012, there had been 5,656 successful ascents of Everest, while 223 people had died—a fatality rate of 4 percent.