Top 10 Mountains Facts for Kids

Mountains are giant land features that can be found all over the world. Famous mountain ranges include the Himalayans, the Andes, and the Alps. Thousands of visitors visit these majestic mountain ranges every year, dreaming of, one day, summiting these famous peaks!

Typically mountains rise high into the air in a small area and are made from rocks and earth. The land feature must be over 600 meters tall to be called a mountain. Anything smaller than that is called a hill! This means that reaching the top of a mountain is an amazing achievement of perseverance and stamina!

Have you ever climbed a mountain? Keep reading below to discover ten amazing facts about mountains!

  1. Mauna Kea (in Hawaii) is over 10,000 meters tall but only 4207 meters above sea level. The rest of the mountain is found underwater.
  2. In 2021, Nepalese mountaineer Nirmal Purja and his team became the first to successfully climb 14 mountains (all 8000 meters above sea level) in under seven months! The previous record was seven years!
  3. In 1998, Bear Grylls (aged 23) became the youngest person to climb Mount Everest (8848m above sea level).
  4. Scientists believe that the fastest-growing volcano was an underwater volcano near New Zealand called the Monowai Cone. In 2011, it grew by 79 meters in just three weeks!
  5. The worst avalanche in history was on Mount Huascaran in Peru in 1970. It was caused by an earthquake and sadly killed 20,000 people.
  6. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were officially the first to climb Mount Everest’s summit in 1953.
  7. The formation of the Andes Mountains redirected the Amazon river into the Atlantic Ocean – the river had previously flowed into the Pacific.
  8. Whale fossils have been found on top of the Andes Mountains, proving that this rock had once been at the bottom of an ocean.
  9. Mount Everest is growing by about 6cm each year due to the Indian sub-continent pushing into Asia.
  10. The most difficult mountain to climb is K2 on the Pakistan-China border. It is only two and a half football fields shorter than Mount Everest. It’s called ‘Savage Mountain’ as it’s only possible to climb it by certain routes rather than all sides.
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