Mount Everest

Mount Everest, on the Nepal-Tibet border in the Mahalangur Himal section of the Himalayas, is Earth's highest point above sea level, its summit standing about 8,849 meters high by the 2020 Nepal-China joint remeasurement. It formed as part of the broader Himalayan mountain-building episode that began roughly 50 million years ago when the northward-drifting Indian tectonic plate collided with and continues to push into the Eurasian plate, folding and thrusting up enormous slabs of crust rather than one being subducted beneath the other. The summit pyramid itself is capped by the Qomolangma Formation, a grey, fossil-bearing marine limestone of Ordovician age, meaning rock that was originally laid down on the floor of the ancient Tethys Ocean now sits atop the highest point on land, thrust upward and exposed as the collision has progressively raised and folded the region's crust. The mountain continues to rise by roughly a few millimeters a year as the collision persists, though uplift is partly offset by erosion and by the effects of large regional earthquakes. This entity documents Everest specifically as a named geological formation shaped by continental collision, a distinct facet from its treatment as a place and landform in the Geography Atlas.