• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Everest Is A Freak Among The Himalayas, And Now We Know Why

September 30, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Despite being absolute behemoths, the tallest peaks in the Himalayas are all close together in height – except for one. Mount Everest towers over its esteemed neighbors by hundreds of meters, and new research has finally revealed the cause of the famous peak’s unusual height.

Advertisement

Standing at an incredible 8,849 meters (29,032 feet) high, Everest – also known as Chomolungma in Tibetan or Sagarmāthā in Nepali – is 238 meters (781 feet) taller than K2. According to the authors of the new study, this discrepancy doesn’t really make sense, “given the relative […] uniformity of tectonics in the Himalayas, which provides mountain peak buoyancy with local, small-scale variability, and relatively uniform climatic conditions and erosional processes.”

As a consequence, the next four highest peaks after Everest are separated by a total of just around 120 meters (394 feet). Everest’s extraordinary size therefore appears to be a significant anomaly, which the researchers believe can be explained by a high-altitude river network forcing the summit of Everest skywards by a few millimeters a year.

“Mount Everest is a remarkable mountain of myth and legend and it’s still growing,” said study author Adam Smith in a statement. “Our research shows that as the nearby river system cuts deeper, the loss of material is causing the mountain to spring further upwards.”  

The culprit appears to be the Arun river, which passes by the mountain to the east before joining up with the larger Kosi river. Over many millennia, the Arun has cut a deep gorge through the heart of the Himalayas, removing billions of tonnes of rock.

The erosion of such colossal quantities of material has triggered a process called isostatic rebound, whereby the immense pressure of the Earth’s liquid mantle pushing upwards from below the crust gains an advantage against the depleted weight of the ground. This, in turn, appears to be fuelling Everest’s constant growth.

Advertisement

“The interaction between the erosion of the Arun river and the upward pressure of the Earth’s mantle gives Mount Everest a boost, pushing it up higher than it would otherwise be,” explained study author  Dr Xu Han.

By calculating the erosion rates of several waterways in the network, the study authors were able to determine that the Arun joined up with the Kosi around 89,000 years ago. This merger caused an increase in the magnitude of isostatic rebound by enabling larger quantities of earth and sediment to be washed away down the Kosi – a phenomenon known as drainage piracy.

As a result, Everest is currently growing by roughly 2 millimeters (0.08 inches) per year, and the researchers calculate that the enormous mountain has gained between 15 and 50 meters (49 to 164 feet) in height since the two rivers met. Other peaks in the region, including Lhotse and Makalu, have also had their summits raised by the same isostatic rebound, elevating them to fourth and fifth position respectively on the list of the world’s highest mountains from sea level.

The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-Manchester test likely to be postponed after India COVID-19 case
  2. EU to attend U.S. trade meeting put in doubt by French anger
  3. Soccer-West Ham win again, Leicester and Napoli falter
  4. Was Jesus A Hallucinogenic Mushroom? One Scholar Certainly Thought So

Source Link: Everest Is A Freak Among The Himalayas, And Now We Know Why

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version