Huascaran

Huascaran stands in the Cordillera Blanca in Peru's Ancash Department, reaching an elevation of about 6,768 meters at its southern summit, the highest point in Peru, in the northern Andes, and in the Earth's tropics as a whole. It is a non-volcanic granite massif with two summits divided by a saddle known as La Garganta, raised by the same tectonic uplift responsible for the rest of the Andes rather than by volcanism, and its slopes are protected within Huascaran National Park. Like Chimborazo, to which it is second, its position near the equatorial bulge makes it one of the points on Earth's surface farthest from the planet's center. On May 31, 1970, an earthquake triggered a catastrophic avalanche of roughly 80 million cubic meters of ice, mud and rock down its slopes, burying the towns of Yungay and Ranrahirca and killing more than 20,000 people. This entity documents Huascaran specifically as a geological formation, the highest peak in Peru and site of one of the deadliest avalanches in recorded history.