The 14 mountains above 8,000 metres

Fourteen mountains on Earth rise above 8,000 metres. Every one of them stands in Asia, in the Himalaya or the Karakoram, and all fourteen sit inside just three countries: Nepal, China and Pakistan — several of them straddling a border between two.

The threshold is arbitrary — nothing changes in the rock at 8,000 metres — but it has defined mountaineering for a century, because it marks roughly where the death zone begins: above about 8,000 metres the air holds too little oxygen for the human body to acclimatise, and time spent there is time spent dying.

Everest is the highest, but K2 is the harder climb, and Annapurna, the lowest of the fourteen, has historically been the deadliest of all.

See all 14 on the map →

Elevations are the curated figures the map itself uses, from Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica; Everest follows the 2020 Nepal-China joint survey. Countries are the sovereigns the summit lies in, or on the border of.