Mount Everest

• 1. Introduction

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  Mount Everest stands 8,848.86 metres above sea level, according to the most recent measurement, a joint survey by Nepalese and Chinese authorities. The summit sits on the border between the two countries, so neither could simply announce a number alone.

  That figure sounds settled, but almost everything about this mountain has been argued over. Who first saw that it was the highest peak on Earth? Why does it carry the surname of a man who said it could not be pronounced in India? Is rock or snow the true top?

  Then there is a stranger puzzle. The standard route up the mountain poses no substantial technical climbing challenge. Yet altitude sickness, weather, wind, avalanches and a shifting river of ice have made it one of the most dangerous places people choose to visit. Why do they keep going, and what does it cost them?

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• 2. Finding Peak XV

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  The Nepali and Sanskrit name for the mountain is Sagarmāthā, which means the head in the great blue sky. It joins sagar, meaning sky, to māthā, meaning head. The Tibetan name, Qomolangma, means holy mother.

  A Chinese transcription of that Tibetan name was first recorded in the 1721 Kangxi Atlas, issued under the Qing Emperor Kangxi. In 1733 the French geographer D'Anville drew a map based on that atlas. It carried the name into the West as Tchoumour Lancma. In May 1952 the Chinese Ministry of Internal Affairs decreed that a single name should be adopted, and Zhūmùlǎngmǎ Fēng became the official Chinese form.

  The English name has a different origin. In 1802 the British began the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India to fix the locations, heights and names of the world's highest mountains. Its giant theodolites each weighed 500 kg and took 12 men to carry. The teams reached the Himalayan foothills by the 1830s, but Nepal refused every request to enter, suspicious of British intentions.

  The surveyors worked instead from the Terai, a region south of Nepal that runs parallel to the Himalayas. Torrential rains and malaria made it punishing. Three survey officers died of malaria, and two more retired with failing health. In 1847 the survey pressed on regardless, observing peaks from stations up to 240 km away. Weather limited the work to the last three months of each year.

  In November 1847 Andrew Scott Waugh, the British Surveyor General of India, was observing from the Sawajpore station. Kangchenjunga was then believed to be the highest peak in the world. Behind it, about 230 km away, he noticed another summit. John Armstrong, one of his subordinates, saw it from farther west and called it peak b.

  In 1849 Waugh sent James Nicolson, who made two observations from Jirol, 190 km away. Nicolson then took the largest theodolite east and made more than 30 observations from five locations. The nearest was 174 km from the peak. He retreated to Patna on the Ganges to do the calculations. His raw average was 9200 m, which ignored light refraction, but it clearly beat Kangchenjunga. Malaria forced him home before he finished.

  Michael Hennessy, one of Waugh's assistants, had started labelling peaks with Roman numerals. Kangchenjunga was Peak IX, so peak b became Peak XV. In 1852, at the survey headquarters in Dehradun, Radhanath Sikdar became the first person to identify it as the highest in the world. Sikdar was an Indian mathematician and surveyor from Bengal, and he used trigonometry on Nicolson's measurements.

  Waugh began work on Nicolson's data in 1854. He and his staff spent almost two years wrestling with light refraction, barometric pressure and temperature across those vast distances. In March 1856 he announced the result in a letter to his deputy in Calcutta. Kangchenjunga came out at 28156 ft and Peak XV at 29002 ft. Waugh concluded that Peak XV was "most probably the highest in the world".

  The calculation had actually produced exactly 29000 ft. Waugh added two feet so the figure would not look like a rounded estimate. He is sometimes playfully credited as "the first person to put two feet on top of Mount Everest".

  Naming came next. The 1849 survey had tried to keep local names where possible, as with Kangchenjunga and Dhaulagiri. Waugh claimed he could find no commonly used local name, and said the exclusion policies of Nepal and Tibet had hampered his search. Because many local names existed, he argued, favouring one would be difficult. He chose to honour his predecessor, Sir George Everest.

  Everest himself objected. In 1857 he told the Royal Geographical Society that his surname could be neither written in Hindi nor pronounced by "the native of India". The society adopted "Mount Everest" officially in 1865 anyway. George pronounced his own name EEV-rist, which is not how it is said today.

  For a time in the late 19th century, many European cartographers wrongly believed the native name was Gaurishankar. That name is now used for a different peak about 30 miles away.

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• 3. How Tall Is It

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  From 1952 to 1954 the Survey of India used triangulation to find a height of 8847.73 m. In 1975 a Chinese measurement gave 8848.13 m. In both cases the team measured the snow cap rather than the rock beneath it. Nepal and China officially recognised 8848 m.

  In May 1999 an American expedition directed by Bradford Washburn anchored a GPS unit into the highest bedrock. The device gave a rock elevation of 8850 m, with snow and ice about 1 m above that. Nepal had not officially recognised this figure as of 2001, though it is widely quoted. Uncertainty about the geoid, the surface that approximates sea level, casts doubt on the accuracy claimed by both this survey and the 2005 one.

  On the 9th of October 2005 the Chinese Academy of Sciences and State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping announced a rock height of 8844.43 m, accurate to 0.21 m. Their team measured a snow and ice depth of 3.5 m, which agrees with a net elevation of 8848 m. Even so, China favoured the rock height of 8,844 m, while Nepal favoured the snow height of 8,848 m.

  In 2010 the two sides agreed that Everest is 8,848 m high, and Nepal recognised China's claim for the rock height. Nepal then planned a new survey in 2019 to check whether the April 2015 earthquake had changed the mountain. On the 8th of December 2020 the two countries jointly announced a new official height.

  The mountain is also moving. The Main Himalayan Thrust and related faults form the boundary where the Eurasian and Indian plates meet, and they are thought to be lifting the summit and pushing it northeastwards. One account suggests 4 mm per year vertically and 3 to 6 mm per year horizontally. Another reports more sideways movement, 27 mm, and even shrinkage has been proposed.

  Height above sea level is only one way to rank a mountain. Mauna Kea in Hawaii rises over 10200 m from the mid-ocean floor, though only 4205 m of it clears the water. Denali in Alaska reaches just 6190 m above sea level, but it sits on a sloping plain between 300 and 900 m. That gives it a height above base of 5300 to 5900 m, with 5600 m commonly quoted. Reasonable base elevations for Everest give only 3650 to 4650 m.

  Chimborazo in Ecuador tops out at 6268 m above sea level, far below Everest. Yet its summit is farther from the centre of the Earth, at 6384.4 km compared with 6382.3 km for Everest, because the planet bulges at the equator.

  A climber never covers the full height from the geoid. The closest sea to the summit is the Bay of Bengal, almost 700 km away. Tim Macartney-Snape's team in 1990 started from that coastline to climb the entire height of the mountain.

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• 4. Ocean Floor Summit

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  The highest rocks on Earth were once sea floor. Geologists divide Everest into three formations separated by low-angle faults called detachments, along which the layers have been thrust southward over one another. From the summit down, they are the Qomolangma Formation, the North Col Formation and the Rongbuk Formation.

  The Qomolangma Formation runs from the top to the Yellow Band, about 8600 m above sea level. It is mostly Ordovician limestone. The geologist Gansser first reported microscopic fragments of crinoids in it, and later analysis of summit samples found the remains of trilobites, crinoids and ostracods. A white-weathering thrombolite bed 60 m thick forms the foot of the Third Step and the base of the summit pyramid. Cyanobacteria and other micro-organisms built it in shallow seas by trapping and binding sediment in biofilms.

  The North Col Formation makes up the bulk of the mountain between 7000 and 8,600 m. Its upper part, the Yellow Band, is Middle Cambrian marble that weathers to a distinctive yellowish brown. Marble collected near 8300 m contains as much as five per cent ghosts of recrystallised crinoid ossicles.

  Below 7,000 m, the Rongbuk Formation forms the base. It consists of schist and gneiss cut by sills and dikes of leucogranite, from 1 cm to 1,500 m thick. These formed about 20 to 24 million years ago, when high-grade rocks partly melted as the Indian Plate went under Asia. The upper layers began as marine sediment on the northern edge of India before the two landmasses collided.

  In October 2022 the International Union of Geological Sciences included the Ordovician rocks of Mount Everest among its 100 geological heritage sites around the world.

  Life is sparse. A moss grows at 6480 m and may be the highest plant species anywhere. Satellite data from 1993 to 2018 show vegetation expanding in the region, with plants turning up in places once judged bare. A tiny black jumping spider of the genus Euophrys has been found at 6700 m, possibly the highest confirmed permanent resident of Earth that is not microscopic.

  Bar-headed geese migrate over the Himalayas. In 1953 George Lowe, a member of the expedition with Tenzing and Hillary, said he saw them flying over the summit. Choughs have been spotted as high as 7900 m. Yaks haul around 100 kg of climbers' gear, and the region also shelters the Himalayan tahr, which snow leopards hunt, as well as the red panda. One expedition found a pika and ten new species of ants.

  Sagarmatha National Park protects the Nepalese side, and Qomolangma National Nature Reserve protects the Chinese side.

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• 5. Route to the Top

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  Around midnight on the South Col, at 7920 m, summit day begins. Climbers hope to cover the last 1,000 m of height in 10 to 12 hours. The first landmark is the Balcony at 8400 m, a small platform where they can rest and watch dawn light reach the peaks to the south and east. Above it, rock steps often push them east into waist-deep snow, a serious avalanche hazard.

  At 8750 m a table-sized dome of ice and snow marks the South Summit. Beyond it lies the Cornice traverse, a knife-edge ridge where snow clings to scattered rock. A misstep to the left means a fall of 2400 m down the Southwest Face. To the right waits the 3050 m Kangshung Face. The traverse ends at a 12 m rock wall, the Hillary Step, at 8790 m.

  The journey to that midnight start is long. Expeditions on the Nepalese side usually fly from Kathmandu to Lukla, at 2,860 m, and pass through Namche Bazaar. The hike to Base Camp at 5380 m takes six to eight days, leaving time to acclimatise. Yaks, dzopkyos (yak-cow hybrids) and human porters carry supplies onto the Khumbu Glacier. From Lukla to the summit is about 6000 m of climbing. On the Tibetan side, most climbers simply drive to North Base Camp.

  On the Nepalese side, Sherpas and some expedition climbers spend the first weeks at Base Camp fixing ropes and ladders through the Khumbu Icefall. Seracs, crevasses and shifting ice blocks make it one of the most dangerous stretches of the route, and many climbers and Sherpas have died there. Climbers go before dawn, when freezing temperatures glue the blocks in place.

  Camp I sits above the icefall at 6065 m. Beyond it lies the Western Cwm, a gently rising glacial valley split by huge crevasses. Its topography blocks the wind, earning it the name Valley of Silence, and a clear windless day can make it unbearably hot. Camp II, at 6500 m, stands at the foot of the Lhotse Face. Fixed ropes lead up to Camp III at 7470 m, on a small ledge.

  Between Camps III and IV climbers cross the Geneva Spur, an anvil-shaped rib of black rock named by the 1952 Swiss expedition. They also cross the Yellow Band, which needs about 100 metres of rope. On the South Col they enter the death zone. Most summit bidders can endure no more than two or three days at that altitude.

  The weather dictates everything. Everest has an ice cap climate in which every month averages well below freezing. Air pressure at the summit is about one-third of the sea-level value, or 33.7 kPa. The peak reaches into the jet stream, where winds commonly hit 100 mph. In February 2004 a gust of 175 mph was recorded at the summit.

  Such winds can blow climbers into chasms. By the Bernoulli effect they can also lower air pressure further, cutting available oxygen by up to 14 percent. Climbers therefore aim for a window of 7 to 10 days in spring or autumn, when the Asian monsoon is starting or ending and the jet stream shifts north. Most attempts come in May.

  A weather station on the South Col went online in 2008 as a project of SHARE, which added a webcam in 2011. In 2019 climate scientists Tom Matthews and Baker Perry placed the Balcony Station at about 8430 m, the highest weather station on the planet. It stopped transmitting data as of the 20th of January 2020.

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• 6. Before the Summit

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  In 1885 Clinton Thomas Dent, president of the Alpine Club, suggested in his book Above the Snow Line that climbing Everest was possible. Nepal did not admit foreigners, so the British looked to Tibet. George Mallory and Guy Bullock found the northern approach on the 1921 reconnaissance expedition. Mallory became the first European to set foot on the mountain's flanks and climbed the North Col to 7005 m. He spotted a route to the top, but the party was unprepared to continue.

  The 1922 expedition made the first summit attempt. Mallory, Col. Felix Norton and Howard Somervell, without bottled oxygen, reached 8225 m, the first reported climb above 8000 m. George Finch and Geoffrey Bruce then used oxygen for the first time and ascended at a remarkable 290 m per hour. They reached 8321 m.

  In 1924 Norton and Somervell climbed without oxygen in perfect weather, crossing the North Face into the Great Couloir. Norton reached 8572.8 m, though he gained only about 30 m in his last hour. Mallory made a last-ditch effort with oxygen equipment and chose the young Andrew Irvine as his partner. On the 8th of June 1924 they set out on the North Col, North Ridge and Northeast Ridge route and never returned.

  On the 1st of May 1999 the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition found Mallory's body on the North Face, in a snow basin below and west of the traditional site of Camp VI. Irvine's detached foot, still in a boot and sock, was found in 2024. Mountaineers still argue about whether one or both reached the top, 29 years before the first confirmed ascent.

  In 1933 a British millionaire, Lady Houston, funded a flight in which two aeroplanes led by the Marquess of Clydesdale passed over the summit. Hugh Ruttledge's expeditions of 1933 and 1936 both failed on the northern side. Access from the north closed to Western expeditions in 1950, after China took control of Tibet.

  That same year Bill Tilman led a small party, including Charles Houston, Oscar Houston and Betsy Cowles, through Nepal. They followed the route that became the standard approach from the south. In 1952 a Swiss expedition received permission to attempt the climb. It forged a path through the Khumbu icefall to the South Col at 7986 m. Raymond Lambert and the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay reached about 8595 m on the Southeast Ridge, a new altitude record. A second Swiss attempt in the autumn was driven back by winter winds and severe cold.

  In 1953 a ninth British expedition, led by John Hunt, returned to Nepal. It started from the Kathmandu Valley with over 400 climbers, porters and Sherpas, because no roads ran farther east. Hunt chose two pairs for the summit. Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans came within 100 m on the 26th of May, but oxygen problems forced them back. Their route-finding, trail-breaking and oxygen caches helped the pair who followed.

  Two days later Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepali Sherpa climber, made the second assault. Tenzing's experience from the Swiss attempt had helped win him a place on the team. They reached the summit at 11:30 am local time on the 29th of May 1953 by the South Col route. Both called it a team effort. A few years later Tenzing revealed that Hillary had set foot on top first. They took photographs and buried sweets and a small cross in the snow.

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• 7. Decades of Firsts

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  On the 23rd of May 1956, Ernst Schmied and Juerg Marmet reached the summit. Four years later, on the 25th of May 1960, the Chinese team of Wang Fuzhou, Gonpo and Qu Yinhua made the first reported ascent from the North Ridge.

  On the 1st of May 1963 Jim Whittaker, joined by Nawang Gombu, became the first American to climb Everest. Three weeks later, on the same expedition, Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld became the first to traverse the mountain. They went up the North Face and down by the South Col.

  The Japanese expedition of 1970 was a huge "siege" effort on the Southwest Face. It had more than a hundred staff and a decade of planning, and it still failed to reach the top, with eight deaths. Yuichiro Miura did become the first man to ski down from the South Col. He descended nearly 4,200 ft before falling with extreme injuries. He later became the oldest person to summit, at 70 in 2003 and again at 80 in 2013.

  In 1975 Junko Tabei became the first woman to summit. That year Chris Bonington led and organised a British expedition that made the first ascent of the Southwest Face from the Western Cwm. In 1978 Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler made the first ascent without supplemental oxygen.

  The Polish climber Andrzej Zawada headed the first winter ascent of Everest, in the winter of 1979-80, and the first winter ascent of any eight-thousander. On the 15th of January the team set up Camp III at 7150 m, but hurricane-force winds stopped further progress. After the 11th of February the weather improved, and Leszek Cichy, Walenty Fiut and Krzysztof Wielicki established Camp IV on the South Col at 7906 m.

  Cichy and Wielicki started the final climb at 6:50 am on the 17th of February. At 2:40 pm Zawada heard their voices over the radio at base camp: "We are on the summit! The strong wind blows all the time. It is unimaginably cold." Winter ascents became a Polish specialty, and after 1980 Poles made ten first winter ascents on 8000 m peaks.

  In 1989 Eugeniusz Chrobak led a Polish team on a difficult western ridge. Ten Poles and nine foreigners took part, but only the Poles stayed for the summit attempt. On the 24th of May, Chrobak and Andrzej Marciniak started from Camp V at 8200 m and reached the top.

  On the 27th of May an avalanche from the side of Khumbutse, near the Lho La pass, killed four climbers: Mirosław Dąsal, Mirosław Gardzielewski, Zygmunt Andrzej Heinrich and Wacław Otręba. Chrobak died the next day of his injuries. The injured Marciniak was saved by a rescue effort that included Artur Hajzer and the New Zealanders Gary Ball and Rob Hall. Reinhold Messner, Elizabeth Hawley, Carlos Carsolio and the US consul helped organise it. Rob Hall would be dead on the mountain within seven years.

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• 8. Crowds and Cost

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  As of May 2024, 340 people have died on Everest. More than 200 bodies remain on the mountain, because conditions are too dangerous to bring them down.

  According to Jon Krakauer, the commercial era began in 1985. A guided expedition led by David Breashears reached the summit with Richard Bass, a wealthy 55-year-old businessman who had only four years of climbing experience. By the early 1990s several companies offered guided trips. Rob Hall had guided 39 clients to the summit before the events of 1996.

  On the 10th and the 11th of May 1996, eight climbers died after guided expeditions were caught in a blizzard during a summit attempt. Fifteen people died that season. Between 33 and 36 climbers tried to summit on the same day, an unusually large crowd at the time. Researchers from the University of Toronto later suggested that weather had made oxygen levels fall about 14 per cent.

  Jon Krakauer, on assignment from Outside magazine, was in one of the affected parties. His bestseller Into Thin Air criticised the guide Anatoli Boukreev. A year later Boukreev co-authored The Climb, partly as a rebuttal. Boukreev received the American Alpine Club's David Sowles Award for his rescue efforts. Matt Dickinson told of the north side in The Other Side of Everest, and a 2015 feature film, Everest, dramatised the disaster.

  Beck Weathers was left for dead about 275 metres from Camp 4. After a night on the mountain he made it back with massive frostbite and snow blindness. Fellow climbers again judged his condition terminal and left him in a tent. He was lowered to Camp 2, and the Nepali Army organised a helicopter rescue.

  A different kind of controversy followed in 2006, when 12 people died. David Sharp tried to summit alone, without a radio or guide, carrying two bottles of oxygen where most climbers carry five. On the 15th of May many parties passed him sheltering under a rock overhang 450 m below the summit. Mark Inglis, a double-amputee climber, said none attempted a rescue, though he later revised details because he had been exhausted and in pain. The case set off years of debate about climbing ethics. Days later Lincoln Hall, wrongly reported dead, was found alive and brought down by a party that abandoned its own attempt.

  The crowds kept growing. On the 23rd of May 2010, 169 climbers reached the summit in a single day, more than in the 31 years from 1953 to 1983. On the 18th of April 2014 an avalanche killed 16 Nepali guides, and Sherpa guides walked off the job in mourning. On the 25th of April 2015 a 7.8 magnitude earthquake triggered an avalanche from Pumori that hit Base Camp. It ended the season, the first spring without a summit since 1974.

  A record 891 climbers summited in 2018, helped by an 11-day clear weather window. Old-timers from the 1980s lamented the crowding, the feces and the cost. In spring 2019 images of hundreds queuing to the summit dismayed people around the world, and a 12th climber was declared dead by the 28th of May. Nepal issued 381 permits that year, and 891 climbers again reached the top.

  The prices are steep. By 2016 most guiding services cost between US$35,000 and US$200,000. The Nepal permit alone costs US$10,000 to US$30,000 per person, depending on team size. Tourism supplied 7.9 per cent of Nepal's GDP in 2019, and an Everest porter can earn nearly double the national average wage.

  Jamling Tenzing Norgay, son of Tenzing Norgay, said in 2003 that his father would have been shocked. "You still have to climb this mountain yourself with your feet. But the spirit of adventure is not there any more," he said. Reinhold Messner agreed in 2004, arguing that "a mountain without danger is not a mountain". Edmund Hillary was more mixed. He said guided climbers were not really mountaineering, but he had no regrets about the changes. With the Sherpas he had helped build 27 schools, two hospitals, a dozen medical clinics, bridges and water pipelines.

  In 2025 four men climbed the mountain within one week after inhaling xenon gas, which they claimed removed the need for weeks of acclimatisation. The International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation criticised the claim and warned that xenon is an anaesthetic. In April 2025 Nepal announced that climbers must have summited a 7,000-metre peak in Nepal to get a permit, starting in spring 2026.

  The Khumbu Glacier beneath the Nepalese base camp is thinning and destabilising because of climate change. Officials planned to move the camp lower, but climbers and Sherpa communities resisted. No alternative site lets climbers pass through the icefall in the safer early morning hours, so the plan is on hold.

  In 2026 Nepal issued a record 492 permits. That year Kami Rita Sherpa, aged 56, reached the summit for the 32nd time, while Lhakpa Sherpa made her record 11th ascent.

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