Interesting facts about Mount Everest

mount everest

Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world at 8,848 meters (29,035feet).

The summit is the border of Nepal to south and Tibet on the north.

The local Tibetan people, called Sherpa, call it “Chomolungma” which means “Mother Goddess of the Universe” and in Nepal, it is called “Sagarmatha” which means “Goddess of the Sky“.

It is over 60 million years old.

mount everest

Everest was formed by movement of the Indian tectonic plate pushing up and against the Aisan plate.

It grows about 4 milimeters (0.15 inches) every year.

Mount Everest shrank one inch (2.5 cm) due to the 2015 earthquake in Nepal.

The temperature on the mountain gets well below freezing at – 62°C (- 80°F) and the wind can blow at speeds of 322 Km/h (200 mph).

Mt. Everest is always covered in snow and ice. Many successful climbs to the summit happen in May. This is because the weather conditions are more favorable.

mount everest expedition

It takes 2 months for the human body to adapt to climbing Mt. Everest because of the air getting so thin with increasing altitude.

There are several camps up the mountain and mountaineers trek to one camp and then when ready and adapted to the altitude, they move on to the next one up the mountain.

mount everest base camp

The first humans to ever reach the summit (top) on the southern side of the mountain were Sir Edmund Hilary, a mountaineer from New Zealand and his guide, a local Nepalese man called Tenzing Norgay. They made it to the summit on May 29, 1953.

Reinhold Messner was the first to climb the mountain alone and without oxygen in 1980.

Over 5,000 climbers have successfully reached Mount Everest’s peak, including a 13-year-old, a blind person, and a 73-year-old woman.

mount everest summit

In 2013, Yuichiro Miura, an 80-year-old Japanese, became the oldest person to make it to the top of Mount Everest and down.

In 2011, two men paraglided from the summit of Mount Everest, arriving at a village in 42 minutes and avoiding the dangerous conventional 3 day descent.

paragliding from everests peak

Frenchman Marco Siffredi and Austrian Stefan Gatt snowboarded down the mountain in 2001.

mount everest snowboard

A man rode his bike from Sweden to Mount Everest and then tried to summit. He turned around 90 meters (300 feet) from the top.

The mountain was named after George Everest in 1856. He had never even seen the peak.

In 2005, a Nepalese couple became the first to marry on top of Mount Everest.

At Everest’s highest point, you are breathing in a third of the amount of oxygen you would normally breathe. This isn’t because of different air composition but rather because of less air pressure.

Mount Everest has about 200 dead bodies on it, which are now landmarks on the way to the top.

Since 1969 at least one person has died on Everest every year except for 1977.

The boiling point of water at the top of Mt. Everest is 71 °C (160 °F).

There’s high-speed Internet on the way up to Mount Everest.

Google Maps‘ Streetview includes 360-degree views of the Mount Everest base camp.

The rock at the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone and would have been deposited on the seafloor around 450 million years ago.