Mount Everest or Mariana Trench?

Mount Everest, called Sagarmatha in Nepali and Chomolungma in Tibetan, is the highest mountain on Earth measured from sea level, with its summit reaching 8,848.86 meters (29,031.7 feet) per the 2020 joint China-Nepal survey. Located in the Mahalangur Himal section of the Himalayas on the border between Nepal and Tibet, it formed roughly 60 million years ago through the collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates, and it still rises about 4 millimeters per year. The first confirmed summit was achieved on May 29, 1953 by Sir Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa from Nepal. Above 8,000 meters lies the death zone where oxygen is about one-third sea level. Over 300 climbers have died on Everest, many bodies still preserved on its slopes.

The Mariana Trench is the deepest known location in Earth's oceans, located in the western Pacific Ocean east of the Mariana Islands. Its deepest point, the Challenger Deep, plunges approximately 10,935 meters (35,876 feet) below sea level, more than the height of Mount Everest. The trench is a crescent-shaped scar in the seafloor where the Pacific Plate subducts beneath the smaller Mariana Plate. At the bottom, water pressure reaches over 1,086 bars, more than 1,000 times surface atmospheric pressure. Despite the crushing conditions and near-freezing 1 to 4°C temperatures, life thrives: amphipods, snailfish, and microbes survive there. Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh first reached Challenger Deep in 1960 aboard the bathyscaphe Trieste; filmmaker James Cameron made a solo descent in 2012.