December 8: The highest point on Earth, has a newly announced elevation. According to a new joint Chinese-Nepalese calculation, Mount Everest is marginally higher than previously thought. A long-running conflict over the height of the world’s tallest peak, which straddles the countries’ shared border.
Kathmandu and Beijing had differed over its exact height, but after each sent an expedition of surveyors to the summit they have agreed that the official height is 8,848.86 metres (29,032ft), a bit more than their previous calculations.
Nepal previously relied for its measurement on an estimate of 8,848 metres made by the Survey of India in 1954. This was for a long time regarded as the “official” height.
A Chinese measurement in 2005 determined that the rock height of the summit – known as Chomolungmu and Sagamartha in local languages – was 8,844.43 metres (29,017 feet), about 3.7 metres (11 feet) less than the 1954 estimate.
Mount Everest is named after the colonial-era British surveyor George Everest, who never actually saw it. The new measurement will have a little practical impact. K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, is 237 metres lower.
The reason why the newly agreed figure maybe temporary is because the 2,900 km-long Himalayan chains are located on, and was formed by, the uplift caused by the colliding Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates, which are continuing to push up the Himalaya at an average of 1cm every year.
Chinese surveyors climbed the peak in spring this year, when Mount Everest was closed by both countries for other climbers due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Damodar Dhakal, the spokesman for Nepal’s department of the survey, said the Nepali surveyors had used the Global Navigation Satellite System to get “the precise height” of the giant peak.
Both countries sent teams to climb the mountain using GPS and also trigonometry to make the final calculations.
“Once the surveyor’s beacon had been placed on the summit, surveyors at stations around the summit measured the distance from the six points to the beacon, which meant at least six triangles could be calculated to determine the mountain’s height,” Jiang Tao, associate researcher at the Chinese Academy of surveying and mapping, told the state-run China Daily.
Previously mountaineers had suggested a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 2015 which killed nearly 9,000 people in Nepal might have altered the height of Everest.
George Everest, who had surveyed the Himalayan region as Britain’s surveyor-general of India, in reality, had little direct connection to the mountain, which was named after him at the behest of Royal Geographical Society.
Instead, Andrew Waugh, a surveyor-general, was the first to suggest the mountain was the world’s highest, and not Kanchenjunga, which was previously assumed to be the highest.
Technological peaks:
In 1856, mathematician Radhanath Sickdhar found that Everest is the highest mountain in the world while he was working for the Great Trigonometrical Survey, a project dedicated to surveying and mapping the Indian subcontinent. Since then, a handful of surveys have sought to pin down the mountain’s true height with the best technology available at the time.
Until the advent of satellites, surveyors used a device called a theodolite, a precision optical instrument mounted on a tripod, for measuring angles between two designated points. Lugging their heavy equipment from hilltop to hilltop, a survey team would incrementally measure Everest’s height from sea level, zig-zagging north from the Bay of Bengal until they could see the peak.
A 1954 survey using a similar technique calculated that Everest stands at 29,028 feet above sea level, a number that is still recognized by many countries and map publishers.
Then in 1999 a survey led by cartographer and explorer Bradford Washburn, and sponsored by the National Geographic Society, was the first to use GPS technology to measure the Everest summit. That team’s work delivered an altitude of 29,035—the figure still in use by the Society until the new measurements can be fully verified.
