Kathmandu

The next stop on my

tour brings me to the biggest and baddest mountains on the world. I’ve journeyed to Kathmandu, Nepal to see the Himalayas. I’ve seen big mountains before, (after all I am from Seattle) but the Himalayas are so stupendously big it’s mind blowing. I have no idea how the Himalayas came to be, so I did a little bit of research. It turns out the Himalayas are the result of a collision boundary. All the other boundaries I’ve learned about are all semi confusing, but collision boundaries are far easier to understand. Collision

boundaries happen when two plates smash into each other. The two plates hitting is what makes the mountains. They are not volcanoes because there is no magma involved. That is the biggest difference between subduction, and collision boundaries. In subduction boundaries the magma bubbling up from the lower plate creates the mountain. Whereas collision boundaries the plates just run into each other, one doesn’t “sink” under the other. So crazy as this may seem Mount Everest is slowly getting taller. Now for all you readers out there that don’t understand this I will explain. When the two plates hit they don’t just stop, so the plates that created Everest are still smashing into each other. This means that every day Mount Everest gets slightly taller than the day before.