About Nepal
The country of Nepal is located in the heart of south-central Asia. It is a land dominated by the lofty peaks of the high Himalaya to the north that gradually give way to the low-lying plains of the Terai to the south. Nepal is a landlocked Asian country located on the Himalayan Mountain ranges southern slopes. It is located 28.3949° N and 84.1240° E and is bordered on the east, south, and west by India, and on the north by the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. Its domain stretches from east to west for about 800 kilometers and from north to south for 230 kilometers wide.
Nepal has some of the world’s most rugged and severe alpine terrain. Mountains cover over 75 percent of the country. Nepal can be split into four primary physical belts from south to north, each of which runs east to west throughout the nation. The Tarai, a low, flat, fertile land adjacent to India’s border; the forested Churia foothills and Inner Tarai zone, rising from the Tarai plain to the rugged Mahbharat Range; the mid-mountain region between the Mahbhrat Range and the Great Himalayas; and the Great Himalaya Range, rising to more than 29,000 feet (some 8,850 metres).
The Tarai is the northern extension of the Gangetic Plain, ranging in breadth from less than 16 miles to more than 20 miles in some places, and narrowing significantly in others. The Churia Range, which is sparsely populated, rises to more than 4,000 feet in virtually vertical escarpments. There are huge basins from 2,000 to 3,000 feet high, roughly 10 miles wide, and 20 to 40 miles long between the Churia Range to the south and the Mahbhrat Range to the north; these basins are often referred to as the Inner Tarai. They have been cleared of forests and savanna grass in several locations to supply timber and cultivable land.
Between the Mahbharat Range and the Great Himalayas is a complicated system of mountain ranges that spans 50 miles and ranges in elevation from 8,000 to 14,000 feet. The Mahbharat Range’s ridges have a sharp escarpment in the south and a comparatively mild slope in the north. The loftier mountains of the Inner Himalaya (Lesser Himalaya) rise to perennially snow-covered summits to the north of the Mahbharat Range, which encloses the valley of Kathmandu. Within this mid-mountain region, the Kathmandu and Pokhara valleys are flat basins that were produced by the deposition of fluvial and fluvioglacial material transported down by rivers and glaciers from the surrounding mountains during the Pleistocene Epoch’s four glacial and intervening warm phases.
The Great Himalaya Range, ranging in elevation from 14,000 to more than 29,000 feet, contains many of the world’s highest peaks—Everest, Kānchenjunga I, Lhotse I, Makālu I, Cho Oyu, Dhaulāgiri I, Manāslu I, and Annapūrna I—all of them above 26,400 feet. Except for scattered settlements in high mountain valleys, this entire area is uninhabited.