Why is Mt. Everest so big?
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01 Location
Mount Everest is located on the Northern Border of Nepal and the Southern Border of China - the Tibet Autonomous Region. It stands amid a thicket of other giant peaks in Earth's largest continent-on-continent collision. The very rocks at Everest's summit - remnants of an ancient sea floor - make plain the tremendous upward mountain-building forces at work here.
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02 Tectonic plates
Tectonic plates are essentially rafts of cold, rigid rocks that float on top of the warmer, denser and more malleable rocks of Earth's mantle. Oceanic plates are thinner and denser than continental plates. Geologists are still debating exactly what makes the plates move.
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03 Plate collision
When tectonic plates collide one always gets pushed under the other. When it's a continental versus oceanic plate match, the oceanic plate is rather easily shoved down into the mantle. When it's continent versus continent, however, the outcome is mountainous!
- Tibet
- Asian Plate
- Indian Plate
- Heavy sediment
- Light sediment
- Tethys Sea
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04 Indian plate sinks
When the continents collided, the thick Asian Plate barely managed to override the bulky Indian Plate. The land rose and the last vestiges of the Tethys Sea were pushed higher and ever drier.
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05 Creation of the Himalaya
As the continental collision continued, the Tethys Sea dried up completely. But its remains - mostly limestone and marble - rode on top of the tectonic commotion and immense mountain building to become some of the highest parts of the Himalaya range today.
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06 Rise of Mt Everest
The collision that created the Himalaya range, including Everest, is still underway, ramming the Indian and Asian plates together at about five centimetres each year. That causes Everest and its Himalayan siblings to bulge upwards at about 5 millimetres per year.
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07 Continuing growth
Over the next ten million years the swath of mountains that is now Nepal will erode away and more mountains will be pushed up to replace them. In this way the Himalaya will persist until the Indian Plate is gone.
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08 Mt Everest today
8850m/29,035ft
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