Mount Everest

The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone, which means the highest point on Earth spent its early career as seafloor. The rock at the top still holds the remains of small ocean creatures, carried five and a half miles into the sky by the collision of two continents, a fact geology states plainly and declines to apologize for. The mountain rises 29,032 feet on the border of Nepal and Tibet, Sagarmatha on one side and Chomolungma on the other, and since Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary reached the top in 1953 it has remained the defining objective in high-altitude mountaineering.

This map reveals the massive scale of Everest’s topographic footprint. The contour lines trace the three great ridges that define the mountain’s structure: the Southeast Ridge carrying the standard route from Nepal, the North Ridge rising from the Tibetan plateau, and the West Ridge dropping toward the Lho La above the Khumbu Glacier. Between them, the contours compress into the steep faces that have challenged climbers for over a century. The Khumbu Glacier and its icefall appear as a flattening of contours at the mountain’s base, while the surrounding peaks of Lhotse, Nuptse, and Changtse crowd the map with their own dense contour signatures. Everest sits at the center of the greatest concentration of high terrain on the planet.