Mountains

Mountains are landforms that are much higher than the land around them. You can recognise one by three features together:

• a broad base,
• steep slopes,
• a narrow summit (top).

Height alone is not enough: a plateau is high too, but it does not narrow to a point.

Depending on their height, some mountains are covered with snow. At lower altitudes the snow melts every summer and turns into water that feeds rivers. At high altitudes, where it stays very cold, the snow may never melt, so the mountain is snow-capped all year. The melting snow of one mountain can become the river of a whole plain hundreds of kilometres away.

Other highlands that are lower, with less steep slopes and rounded tops, are called hills. So a hill is not just a short mountain: its slopes and its top are different too.

Two useful words:

• Altitude: the height of something above sea level, whether a mountain, a bird or plane in flight, or a satellite.
• Precipitation: water from the air reaching the ground in any form. Rain, snow and hail are the most common forms.

What is snow? Unless you live in a Himalayan region (such as Kashmir, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim or Arunachal Pradesh), you may never have seen it! In the rest of India, most precipitation is rain and hail. But high up, if it is cold enough, snow falls and covers the land like a soft white blanket. Snow and hailstones are simply water falling in a solid state.