Sanskrit’s “abode of snow” holds a hundred peaks over 7,200 metres
The Himalayas separate the Indian subcontinent’s plains from the Tibetan Plateau and host Earth’s highest summit, Everest, plus more than one hundred peaks above 7,200 metres. The range crosses Nepal, India, China, Bhutan, and Pakistan—with Kashmir’s ridges disputed among three of those states.
The name joins two Sanskrit words, hima for frost and ālaya for dwelling. Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau spelled it Himmaleh, the Mahabharata sometimes says Himivan, and Hindu tradition personifies the range as the god Himavat. The arc runs about 2,400 kilometres from Nanga Parbat near the Indus bend in the west to Namcha Barwa beside the great loop of the Yarlung Tsangpo in the east, narrowing from 350 kilometres wide to 151.
From south to north come four parallel belts: the Sivalik Hills, the Lower Himalaya, the towering Great Himalaya and the Tibetan Himalaya; the Karakoram is usually counted apart. The Kali Gandaki gorge slices between Dhaulagiri and Annapurna and splits the chain into western and eastern halves. Farther east the Mahalangur Himal packs four of the six highest mountains, Everest among them, while Kangchenjunga on the Nepal–Sikkim border is third highest and India’s summit. Bhutan’s Gangkhar Puensum may be the tallest unclimbed peak anywhere.
The story begins about 70 million years ago, when India broke from Gondwana and drifted north carrying the Neo-Tethys seafloor. That oceanic slab sank beneath Eurasia, but India’s thick, buoyant continental crust would not follow. Its lower layers slid under while slices of the upper crust stacked up in sheets called nappes; geophysicist Peter Molnar described most of the range as rock that once formed the top of India. A stiffer part shoved into the old volcanic coast farther north, squeezing and thickening it into the Tibetan Plateau.
The Indus, Ganges and Tsangpo–Brahmaputra all rise nearby, and their basins support some 600 million people, with 53 million living in the mountains themselves. Kathmandu is the largest Himalayan city. Many summits are holy in Hinduism and Buddhism, and several, including Machapuchare, Nanda Devi and Kangchenjunga from the Indian side, are closed to climbers. Shimla served as the British Raj’s summer capital, and Dharamsala hosts the Tibetan government in exile.
Source: Himalayas
