Records & People
The summit of the world's highest mountain is 450-million-year-old ocean floor — with fossils of trilobites and sea lilies found just six metres…
By Laxman Rawal · Jul 18, 2026
Pick up a piece of rock on the summit of Mount Everest and you are holding the floor of an ancient ocean. That is not a metaphor. The grey band of rock at the very top of the world — the final few metres every climber touches — is marine limestone, laid down…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
Geologists call the summit rock the Qomolangma Formation — a slab of well-bedded limestone that makes up roughly the top 125 metres of the mountain. It formed on the shallow northern continental shelf of what is now India, at the edge of a vanished tropical…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
The first person to prove any of this on the mountain itself was Noel Odell — the expedition geologist best remembered as the last man to see Mallory and Irvine alive in 1924. High on Everest that spring, at about 7,770 metres, Odell collected limestone…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
The strangest part of the story is that it is not finished. A 2024 study in Nature Geoscience found that erosion by the Arun river, east of Everest, is carving so much rock out of the region that the crust beneath the mountain is slowly rebounding upward —…
Travel Himalaya Nepal · News
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