Three-thousander
Three-thousanders are mountains with a height of between , but less than above sea level. Similar terms are commonly used for mountains of other height brackets e. g. four-thousanders or eight-thousanders. In Britain, the term may refer to mountains above . Climatological significance In temperate latitudes three-thousanders play an important role, because even in summer they lie below the zero degree line for weeks. Thus the chains of three-thousanders always form important climatic divides and support glaciation - in the Alps the contour is roughly the general limit of the "nival step"; only a few glaciated mountains are under (the Dachstein, the easternmost glaciated mountain in the Alps, is, at , not a three-thousander). In the Mediterranean, however, the three-thousanders remain free of ice and, in the tropics, they are almost insignificant from a climatic perspective; here the snow line lies at around to , and in the dry continental areas (Trans-Himalayas, Andes) it may be up to high. Alpinism The designation "three-thousander" is often used for touristic reasons where only a few individual summits exceed this height – e. g. in the Southern Alps, in the eastern part of Austria, in the Limestone Alps, in the Pyrenees or the