Chinese geologists have refuted the general belief that the Himalayas, especially Mount Everest, are steadily growing every year.
They reached the conclusion that the Himalaya mountain range has stopped growing after a recent comprehensive scientific exploration in the region, media reports said.
The Himalayas range was the result of the crash and extrusion of the Indian Plate and Eurasian Plate, which started 65 million years ago.
"We used to think that it would keep rising as long as the extrusion would continue, but in the exploration, we found several north-south valleys, which suggested the tensile force from the movement of Eurasian Plate itself," a well-known geologist, Bian Qiantao said.
"According to our calculation, the extrusion force and tensile force have come to an equilibrium, so the mountains, as well as the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, will not grow any more. In fact, they will become shorter in the future due to erosion," Bian, with the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said.
The exploration has also revealed some myths of the glaciers in the mountains, the report said.
Some geologists once predicted that all the glaciers in the Himalayas will melt away within 50 years because of global warming, but this is too pessimistic to be true.
According to the statistics collected during the latest exploration, the glaciers will remain there in the future, although their scale will become somewhat smaller, he said.
