7 Mount Everest facts that will surprise you

Everyone knows about Mount Everest. It's the tallest peak of the Himalayan mountain range, and straddles the border between northern Nepal and southern Tibet (China). But here are seven facts about Mount Everest that you likely do not know ...

At 8,849 m (29,032 ft) above sea level, Everest is usually referred to as the world's tallest mountain. Which is true, but only if you compare it to other mountains that are entirely above sea level.

If a mountain's height is measured as the distance from its base to its peak, then Hawaii's Mauna Kea is far, far taller than Everest.

Mauna Kea is a volcanic mountain that reaches only 4,207 m (13,802 ft) above sea level. But when you add its hidden bulk, it's a mind-blowing 10,205 m (33,480 ft) tall. That's nearly a mile taller than Everest!

The summit of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador is the farthest peak from Earth's core

Earth isn't a perfect sphere, though that's how how it's represented in images and consequently in our minds. Instead, the centrifugal force created by the planet's constant rotation causes it to bulge at the Equator.

This bulge means the average sea level at the Equator is farther from the Earth's core than the average sea level at either pole.

Everest is nearly 28° N of the Equator, so it sits quite far from Earth's equatorial bulge. Instead of the peak of Everest being the farthest point from the Earth's core, therefore, that honour goes to the Andean peak of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador.

Chimborazo is just 1° S of the Equator. So while its summit is only 6,263 m (20,549 ft) above sea level, it's actually 2,072 m (6,800 ft) further from the Earth's core than the summit of Everest.

It was only in the mid nineteenth century that Mount Everest was identified as the world's highest mountain. Before this time, Mount Kanchenjunga (which sits on the present-day Nepal–India border) was assumed to be the world's highest mountain.

How did this discovery come about? Scholars with the Great Trigonometrical Survey of British India spent half a dozen years calculating the elevations of various Himalayan peaks. Then, in 1856, they officially announced that the mountain they would now call Everest was the world's highest, reaching 8,839.8 m (or 29,002 ft) above sea level.

Before this 1856 name change, Everest had been called Gamma, then Peak b, and then Peak XV.

As just established, Everest is the tallest land-based peak in the world. And it's the tallest by quite a decent margin: the next highest land-based peak is K2 (8,611 m or 28,251 ft) in the Karakoram mountain range of Pakistan.

Yet Everest is reportedly growing even taller.

The theory of plate tectonics says that the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates are continuing to crash into one another. Consequently, Everest is 'growing' by about 4 mm (0.16 in) each year.

This continuous growth is one of the reasons you can come across differing heights for Everest in scientific literature.

The so-called Italian Pyramid near to Everest in Nepal helps today's surveyors monitor the mountain's height. A 2021 announcement declared the mountain to be 8,848.86 m (29,031.69 feet). That's nearly 10 metres taller than the height accorded to it 150 years ago.

The world's tallest mountain is named after the Welsh surveyor George Everest

In 1856, Andrew Waugh, the British Surveyor General of India at the time, insisted on renaming the newly measured mountain in honour of Sir George Everest, his professional predecessor. Everest's name was pronounced Eve-rest, not Ev-a-rest, as we say it today.

Of course, pronunciations evolve, and so the current way of saying the mountain's name is perfectly fine.

Some, however, prefer to refer to the mountain by one of its local names, like Qomolangma, which is Tibetan for "goddess mother of the world", or Sagarmatha, which is Nepalese for "peak of heaven".

In 2010, young American mountaineer Jordan Romero climbed Mount Everest in the company of his father, step-mother and three Sherpas. He made it to the summit, and he was just 13 years old at the time!

The youngest female to summit Everest was Nepalese Sherpa Ming Kipa, who made it to the summit at the age of just 15.

Both Romero and Kipa ascended the mountain from the Tibetan side, as the Nepali Government won't grant a climbing permit to anyone under the age of 16.

The north face of Everest as seen from Tibet

In September 2024, an exciting discovery was made below the north face of Everest: the boot of mountaineer Andrew 'Sandy' Irvine.

Irvine and his climbing companion George Mallory went missing during an Everest summit attempt exactly a hundred years ago. What precisely happened to them, and whether or not they had made it to the peak before they perished, is "the greatest climbing mystery of all time" according to National Geographic.

While Mallory’s remains were found in 1999, Irvine's remained hidden till now. It's hoped that this discovery will help to solve the question of whether or not the two men made it to the summit in the 1920s. If they did, that means Everest was conquered nearly three decades before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made their successful summit in 1953!