Nanga Parbat (The name means "naked mountain") is the ninth-highest mountain of the world with a height of 8,125 meters (26,658 feet). It is located in the
Baltistan region of
Pakistan, towering over the
Indus valley at the northwestern tip of the
Himalayas.
Nanga Parbat was first climbed in 1953 by a German expedition that was supposed to be a memorial for earlier failed German attempts on the mountain that cost 31 lives. In the end, only a single member of the expedition, Herrmann Buhl, reached the summit.
Apart from being hard to climb, the Nanga Parbat is also the subject of some very interesting geology: It is a spearhead of Indian rock thrust into Eurasia by India's tectonic movement. The rocks that surround it to the north, west and east used to be southernmost tip of the part of Asia that India collided with. This high pressure causes the Nanga Parbat to be the world's fastest-growing mountain and, in combination with an unusual erosion pattern of the Indus river, has exposed rock formations of the collision zone that would normally be buried deep in the earth.