A 2020 survey fixed Earth’s roof at 8,848.86 metres
Mount Everest—Sagarmāthā in Nepali, Qomolangma in Tibetan—is Earth’s highest peak above sea level, on the China–Nepal border in the Mahalangur Himal. A 2020 joint Nepalese–Chinese survey set the height at 8,848.86 metres. Standard climbs approach from Nepal’s southeast or China’s north.
Nepali Sagarmāthā means roughly “head in the sky”; Tibetan Qomolangma, “holy mother,” entered Qing records in the 1721 Kangxi Atlas and Western maps in 1733 via D’Anville. Surveyor General Andrew Waugh, blocked from local names by closed borders, imposed the English label after Peak XV from the Great Trigonometrical Survey that began in 1802 with half-tonne theodolites needing twelve porters each.
British parties probed the North Ridge from Tibet when Nepal barred foreigners: the 1921 reconnaissance reached 7,000 metres on the North Col, and 1922 pushed higher. Closest ocean is the Bay of Bengal, nearly 700 kilometres away; Tim Macartney-Snape’s 1990 team famously started from that coast to approximate a full sea-to-summit rise. Altitude sickness, wind, and avalanche risk outweigh technical rock difficulty on the standard route. In 1852 the Bengali mathematician Radhanath Sikdar, working from James Nicolson's readings, was first to identify Peak XV as the world's highest. Waugh announced it in 1856; the sums gave exactly 29,000 feet, so he published 29,002 lest the figure look rounded. George Everest himself objected that his name could be neither written in Hindi nor said by local people, yet the Royal Geographical Society adopted it in 1865.
In 1922 climbers first passed 8,000 metres. George Mallory and Andrew Irvine vanished on a summit bid on 8 June 1924, leaving a lasting debate over whether they reached the top. The first documented ascent came in 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary climbed the Southeast Ridge, and a Chinese team first reported topping out from the north on 25 May 1960. By May 2024, 340 people had died on the mountain and more than 200 bodies remained on its slopes.
The height itself has been argued over. In 2005 China measured bare rock at 8,844.43 metres beneath about 3.5 metres of snow and ice, while Nepal preferred the snow-surface figure of 8,848; the two agreed a compromise in 2010, then jointly announced the 8,848.86 figure on 8 December 2020. Nineteenth-century European mapmakers had meanwhile muddled things further by mistaking nearby Gaurishankar for the peak's native name.
Source: Mount Everest
