The Himalayas

The highest mountain range on earth, raised by the collision of the Indian and Asian plates, that walls off northern India, traps the monsoon, and feeds the great rivers on which well over a billion people depend — a barrier, a water tower, and a holy landscape all at once.

Push two continents into each other for fifty million years and the crust has nowhere to go but up. That collision built the Himalayas, the highest mountains on earth, holding, with the neighboring Karakoram, every one of the world's fourteen peaks above 8,000 metres. They are not only the planet's greatest wall. Their snow and ice feed the Ganges, the Indus, and the Brahmaputra, the rivers that water the lives of well over a billion people. And they are still rising, a few millimetres a year, as India keeps driving north.