Indigenous peoples sometimes used waste shells to flatten sloping landscapes, changing the drainage and chemical makeup of soils. The shells themselves can provide calcium for plants and trees for centuries as they break down. Fish fossils in the Himalayas Climbers who have been to the top of Mount Everest brought back rocks in which the fossils of sea lilies were discovered.
Fossils can also tell how organisms have changed over time. If you find fossils of seashells high in a mountain, you might be able to conclude that the mountain used to be underwater at some point in the past. Snow Leopard and the Red Panda are among the rare and endangered species of the country. There are only about Snow Leopards remaining in the Himalayas of Nepal. But following the Chinese Revolution in , this route to the mountain was closed and so Mt.
Everest expeditions had to explore new routes to reach the peak. The British Expedition climbed up onto the South Col and then along the Southeast Ridge by a route which is now the most heavily used by the thousands of climbers who have attempted to climb the mountain since.
At the time, there were some doubts whether this approach was possible. At 29, feet 8, m in altitude, the air is only one-third as thick as the air at sea level. Members of the expedition, as they did in previous attempts, carried bottled oxygen, but this made for a very heavy load on the climbers and could only supplement their oxygen needs, not fully meet them.
Since , many successful expeditions have climbed Mt. All are salt water lakes which carry the name sea. There is a fourth one, the Aral Sea, which is above sea level. Its water surface at least what remains of it, after one of the biggest environmental disasters of the 20 th century is currently 42 meters above sea level, and it can therefore claim to be the highest salt-water sea on Earth.
It is still some way off Everest though. The highest fresh-water lake on Earth is reported to be the crater lake of the Argentinian volcano Ojos del Salados which is at meters. However, it is rather small, at 35 meters, and by definition should be called a pond rather than a lake.
Cerro Tipas Lake at meters is the next best candidate. There are some higher bodies of water in the Himalayas but they are ephemeral. But every single one of them is topped by the summit of Everest. It is perhaps a bit sobering to think that people who sacrifice their fortune and potentially their lives in order to climb Mount Everest, end up standing on a sea floor.
A sea floor should be lower than the sea it floors. Clearly, things have happened here that turned a sea floor into the roof of the world. The story behind this involves the highest fossil hunting on the planet, and not one but two lost oceans. The presence of marine fossils near the summit of Mount Everest has entered the domain of common knowledge. Many posts, articles, and newspapers state that sea shells are found at the summit. And there is confusion about the fossils of Mount Everest.
Shells are commonly mentioned, of varying sizes. A few sites mention ammonites, and I even found one that claimed the presence of fish. Try to find the source of their information and you quickly hit blanks and dead links. Who did the fossil collecting? Most people climbing Mount Everest do not go there to hunt for fossils. Their goal is to reach the summit — not to bring down the mountain.
On the way down, your main aim is staying alive, while frozen and oxygen-deprived. Where are the fossils of Mount Everest? And what are those fossils? How did a mountain shared between Tibet and Nepal end up with an English name?
You can blame the Royal Geographical Society for that. This was not the British way. Names were needed. Mount Everest had not been noticed at first as being particularly impressive. The exploring had to be done from a considerable distance, from Tibet, as the explorers were not allowed entry into Nepal. Foreshortening meant that other peaks appeared taller.
When no local name could be identified, it was finally named after George Everest, Surveyor General of India. The new pronunciation had a ring to it: it sounded like a special place. However, unbeknown to the explorers, a Tibetan name was already in existence. It was Qomolangma, and that name is now often used.
Nepal has since adopted yet a different name, Sagar-Matha. Pick your choice: whichever name you use, at least you no longer have to point. And what about the height? Nepal and China, who share the summit, quote different numbers for it. Nepal uses the traditional meters.
China claims it is only meters. The first number refers to the actual altitude climbers reach when standing very briefly — there is a queue at the summit. They are standing on meters of snow. People who climbed the mountain from the Tibetan side would find their achievement listed as 4 meters less than those climbing the same mountain from Nepal. When spending a fortune, such details matter.
The Everest expedition. But regardless of the name and the height, Mount Everest is a very dangerous mountain. The sheer number of people climbing it in the brief annual climbing season does not help.
But the statistics of the mountain are sobering. Avalanches during the pre-season preparations are especially deadly. Almost people have died on Mount Everest since George Mallory, who disappeared near the summit together with Irvine in , was born very near to where I now live. The chase of Everest connects the world. The triangular mountain is instantly recognizable. But it is easy to miss the detail in the mountain.
There are several layers. For instance, there is a region with inclined layered bedding, a bit below the summit, clearly visible at the bottom of the summit pyramid. The structure of the mountain is a bit hidden behind the snow. Sweep the snow away, and four main layers appear. The same layers are also visible in the other mountains in the area. The layers are colour-coded in the drawing shown here. RF is a gneiss: rock partly melted and metamorphosed under high temperatures up to C and pressure, deep below the mountain.
The granite was molten crustal rock from below which pushed its way up into this layer, much like granite complexes have done at the heart of every mountain chain.
A low-angle almost horizontal fault separates the layer from the one above, which is colour-coded in green. This layer is called the Everest Series ES , and it consists of sedimentary rock which has been metamorphosed at reasonably high temperatures. This is the layered bedding which was mentioned before. It is a limestone, formed from a shallow marine sediment, heated to become a marble. The layers have moved around: the two faults are planes along which the layers have been sliding into their current position.
They are short-distance migrants. Look at nearby mountains, and the same layers may be seen in the same order, although not at the same altitude. From south to north, the layers decline in altitude. The mountain building that pushed them up in the first place, caused by crustal thickening and intrusion of the granite, was strongest around Mount Everest but less severe further north. There was no turn-over of layers as happened elsewhere, and as is seen in the Alps or Caledonian mountains.
Around Everest, the upper sediment that has been least metamorphosed is always at the top. But few mountains are high enough to reach them: in most cases, erosion has removed this layer completely. There are nine mountains over 8 kilometer high in the high Himalayas.
Of those, 6 still have a sedimentary layer at the top. The top layers of Mount Everest are made from a marine sediment: a sea floor. But which sea? Or rather, which ocean? Instead, there were supercontinents or gigantic land masses that comprised of the continents that we know today.
It was about million years ago that India broke off from Gondwanaland and began to move north, approaching Eurasia. The Tethys Sea, which lay between the two landforms, had a rich and diverse marine life. It took about a hundred million years for the two landforms to collide, but when they did, it was with so much power that the dense crusts of both, crushed together by the immense force, rose upward, forming mountains that rose from beneath the sea.
0コメント