Why there are seashells at the top of Mount Everest, and where you can see them

Records & People The summit of Everest is 450-million-year-old limestone from a tropical seafloor, packed with fossils. How it got there, and where trekkers can see… By Dawa Sherpa · Aug 23, 2026 Read the full story

The top of Mount Everest is a band of limestone that formed on the floor of a warm, shallow sea about 450 million years ago, and it is full of the fossils of the animals that lived there. The highest rock on Earth is not granite or basalt. It is a seabed… Travel Himalaya Nepal · News Read the full story

What the summit is actually made of

Limestone laid down on the bed of the Tethys, an ocean that no longer exists. Geologists call the summit layer the Qomolangma Formation, after Everest's Tibetan name, and it forms roughly the top 125 metres of the mountain. The International Union of… Travel Himalaya Nepal · News Read the full story

The climber who found the first fossils

Noel Odell, the geologist on the 1924 British expedition, found them — on the same expedition that lost George Mallory and Andrew Irvine. Odell was the last man to see the two alive, climbing through drifting cloud high on the mountain. Scouting above 25,500… Travel Himalaya Nepal · News Read the full story

How a seafloor ends up 8,849 metres in the air

India crashed into Asia and the seabed between them had nowhere to go but up. After the supercontinent Pangea broke apart about 200 million years ago, the Indian plate drifted north across the Tethys and, around 55—50 million years ago, met Asia. Neither… Travel Himalaya Nepal · News Read the full story

The Yellow Band you can see from the trail

You cannot touch the summit rock without climbing Everest, but you can see the ocean from Kala Patthar. The pale stripe that rings the upper mountain below the summit pyramid is the Yellow Band, altered marine limestone roughly 172 metres thick that contains… Travel Himalaya Nepal · News Read the full story

Where trekkers can hold the ocean

In the Kali Gandaki valley, where fossil ammonites turn up in the riverbed. Nepalis call them shaligram, and Hindus and Buddhists venerate them as a living form of Vishnu. They are younger than Everest's summit — Jurassic, about 140 million years old, from a… Travel Himalaya Nepal · News Read the full story

Everest Base Camp Trek — 14 Days

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