Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world. 
[Photo Credit: NASA]
It's getting lower, though. It may be endangered.The base camp has dropped from its normal 17,454 ft. to 17,322 ft. this year because of ice melting.
As a symbol of global warming this is hard to beat.
A story here in the Guardian goes on:
The sons of the first men to scale Mount Everest warned today that climate change was ravaging the mountain.Speaking prior to the LiveEarth concerts this weekend, Sir Edmund Hillary's son, Edmund, and Tenzing Norgay's son, Jamling, said the lives of millions of people who rely on Everest's glaciers for drinking water were being put at risk.
The Himalayas have warmed by almost one degree centigrade since the 70s - almost twice the global average rise in temperature - according to the UN environmental programme.
Organisations including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Climate Justice Programme have petitioned the UN's world heritage committee to list the sites as being "in danger".
The sites the groups want to see added to the endangered list are the Great Barrier Reef, in Australia; Sagarmatha National Park (which includes Mount Everest), in Nepal; the Belize Barrier Reef; Huascaran National Park, in Peru; Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, on the US-Canadian border, and the Blue Mountains, in Australia.
It's not just the top, though, so much ice has melted that the sons say their fathers "would no longer recognize the terrain" if they saw it.
Another story on this issue is here: Chinese fear Mount Everest shrinking. They think the top has shrunk by 1.3 m, or 4.2 feet since 1975.
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