Chomolungma

Everest, Mount

 Tibetan Chomolungma Nepali Sagarmatha

Peak on the crest of the Himalayas, southern Asia. The highest point on Earth, with a summit at 29,035 ft (8,850 m), it lies on the border between Nepal and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. Numerous attempts to climb Everest were made from 1921; the summit was finally reached by Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal in 1953. In dispute is whether the English explorer George Mallory, whose body was discovered below Everest's peak in 1999, had actually reached the peak earlier, in 1924, and was descending it when he died. The formerly accepted elevation of 29,028 ft (8,848 m), established in the early 1950s, was recalculated in the late 1990s.

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Chomolungma 

(Mount Everest), the highest mountain massif on earth, in the Himalayas, on the border of Nepal and China. Its altitude is 8,848 m. At the base it is composed of Precambrian gneiss and granite; above 7,000 m, of Mesozoic crystalline limestone and schist. Chomolungma is shaped like a pyramid, of which the southern slope is steepest. Glaciers flow from all sides of the massif, ending at an altitude of about 5,000 m. Snow and névé are not retained on the southern slope and the edges of the pyramid, which are bare as a result. On May 29, 1953, the peak of Chomolungma was reached by members of the English expedition of J. Hunt—the mountaineers Tenzing (a Sherpa, one of the native peoples of Nepal) and E. Hillary (a New Zealander).

REFERENCE

Tenzing, N. Tigr snegov. Moscow, 1961. (Translated from English.)