The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I grow a few millimetres every year, and an earthquake once took some of it back.
I am not the furthest point from the centre of the Earth. A mountain in Ecuador is.
I was named after a surveyor who objected to the honour.
The rock at my summit was once the floor of a sea.
Nepal, Tibet, and 8,849 metres.
Mount Everest
The limestone at the top holds marine fossils. The highest place on Earth used to be the bottom of the Tethys Ocean, and the collision that closed it is still pushing.
The summit is marine limestone, laid down on the floor of the Tethys Ocean and lifted as India drove into Asia — a collision still in progress, which is why the mountain grows a few millimetres a year and lost a little in the 2015 earthquake. It is the highest above sea level but not the furthest from the centre of the Earth: the planet bulges at the equator, so Chimborazo in Ecuador wins that measurement by two kilometres. George Everest, the surveyor general it was named for, objected to the honour on the grounds that locals could not pronounce it.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #46 · today's mystery · the vault
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