[The announcement — which was broadcast live on national television in Nepal — is the culmination of an exhaustive process involving two trips to the summit and years of measurements to calculate Everest’s precise height above sea level.]
By Ankit Adhikari and Joanna Slater
Nepal and China, the two countries
that share a border on Mount Everest, announced a new official measurement of
the mountain’s height on Tuesday: 8,848.86 meters, or 29,031.69 feet.
That’s about three feet higher than
the most commonly used measure of Everest’s height dating back to a survey
conducted by India in the early
1950s.
The announcement — which was
broadcast live on national television in Nepal — is the culmination of an
exhaustive process involving two trips to the summit and years of measurements
to calculate Everest’s precise height above sea level.
"We can be confident that this
is the most accurate height of Everest that we have ever had," said
Susheel Dangol, Nepal's chief survey officer, who led the project. "It was
a huge responsibility on our part. It is a moment of great pride for us."
Scaling
Mt. Everest: A scroll up the icy path
Experts say that Tuesday’s figure
is likely to become the standard height for Everest. “It will be difficult to
improve on the new number,” said Roger Bilham, a geologist at the University of
Colorado. The measurements taken by Nepal are “remarkable for their density.”
The exact height of Everest is a
moving target, geologists say, thanks to shifting tectonic plates and the
occasional earthquake. The former pushes the mountain’s height ever-so-slightly
upward each year, while the latter can cause it to sink.
For Nepal, the drive to measure
Everest was partly an exercise in national pride. Despite being home to the
world’s highest peak, Nepal had never conducted its own measurement. Starting
in 2018, Nepal announced it would spend $1.3
million on the project.
The country’s surveyors employed
two methods to measure the mountain: The first was based on trigonometry, a
time-tested technique that is also known as a leveling survey. The second used
the latest technology, relying on a combination of readings from a satellite
navigation system and a complex model of sea
level.
It wasn’t easy. A Nepali surveyor
who lugged a global positioning device and a ground-penetrating radar to the
summit of Everest last year lost
the tip of a toe to frostbite. His team faced a life-threatening shortage
of oxygen on their descent.
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Mount Everest shrinking? Nepal is on a mission to find out.]
Other surveyors transported a
$200,000 piece of equipment called a gravimeter to 297 spots in Nepal. The
gravimeter measures the force of gravity at a given location. Its readings are
crucial to forming the detailed model of where sea level lies beneath Everest’s
hulk of rock (satellite readings alone are not sufficient to calculate height
above sea level).
The new joint measurement also
involves an element of geopolitics. Nepal is wedged between two larger
neighbors — China and India — and China has sought to deepen its influence in
recent years. On Tuesday, Nepal and China hailed the announcement of Everest’s
height as proof of the strength of their relationship.
The two countries agreed to
collaborate on the Everest effort after a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping
to Nepal in 2019, said Buddhi Narayan Shrestha, the former director general of
Nepal’s survey department who was also a senior adviser on the project.
China conducted its measurement
using new data combined with prior information from its surveys of Everest in
1975 and 2005, Shrestha said.
The calculations by both countries
“have synchronized well enough to reach this single figure,” he said. “It
couldn’t have been more accurate than this.”
Everest — known as Sagarmatha in
Nepal and Chomolungma in Tibet — straddles Nepal and China. Climbers can
approach the summit from either side, but the route from Nepal has long been more popular. In 2019,
crowding on the mountain may have contributed
to one of the deadliest climbing seasons in years.
Nepal shut its borders to tourists
during the pandemic but recently
reopened to climbers. Most people seeking to summit Everest climb the
mountain in the spring, particularly in May, when the weather is more favorable
for ascents.
While Everest is the highest
mountain the world, it is not technically the tallest as measured from base to
peak. That superlative belongs to Hawaii’s Mauna
Kea, which is largely underwater.
Slater reported from New Delhi.
Mount
Everest is full of garbage. A cleanup crew just hauled off 24,000 pounds of
waste.
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Mount Everest’s popularity turned fatal
