Latest height of mount everest

There were no dramatic views taken in or heroic photographs snapped when Khimlal Gautam, a 35-year-old Nepali surveyor and mountaineer, climbed to the top of Mount Everest on May 22, 2019. Gautam and his team had timed their ascent to arrive at around 3 a.m. in the pitch black, when temperatures can plummet to their most lethal, so that they could have the summit to themselves in the midst of On the peak’s highest crest of snow, Gautam, aided by another Nepali surveyor and three Sherpa guides, set up a GPS antenna, which began recording its precise position from a network of satellites. Next, the men deployed ground-penetrating radar to measure the depth of the snow beneath their crampons. The two dark, frigid hours they worked on the world’s highest mountain were not without personal sacrifice: Gautam would later lose a toe to frostbite. Now more than 15 months later, the results of their efforts—a new official height for Mount Everest—are eagerly anticipated. The project, spearheaded by Nepal’s Survey Department, was intended to pinpoint the summit elevation as accurately as possible with state-of-the-art instruments and techniques but also to make a statement of national pride. But as Gautam sat in a tent, drinking chai and recovering from his climb, he knew that as arduous as it might be to get to the highest point on the planet, the next step would present an equally difficult, if less dangerous, challenge. Measuring the world’s tallest mountain isn’t just about findi...

While Nepal used the Bay of Bengal as the sea base, working with figures given by India from a previous survey, China measured its sea-level base from the Yellow Sea. A team of four surveyors from Nepal spent nearly two years training to climb the summit, and built a network of stations stretching across 250 kilometres, till the peak was visible, to create a chain of points to measure and calculate. While the Nepalese team climbed the summit last year, China’s surveyors did so this May, becoming the only team to reach the top after Nepal suspended all climbing expeditions and China banned all foreign flights due to the coronavirus pandemic. While Nepal used global navigation satellite systems to get the exact elevation data for their calculations, China used BeiDou navigation satellite system, their version of GPS. Mount Everest, which was formed by the collision of tectonic plates more than 50 million years ago, still grows by half a metre every century. The mountain was re-measured after some geologists suggested that a massive avalanche that took place in 2015 could have changed its height. The avalanche was caused by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, which killed nearly 9,000 people in Nepal. Some geologists believe this earthquake might have shrunk Mount Everest. This was after scientists revealed that other Himalayan peaks such as Langtang Himal, mostly to the north of Kathmandu and close to the epicentre, had fallen in height by about a metre post-earthquake. However, man...

On Tuesday, China and Nepal announced the results of a year-long joint survey of the tallest mountain in the world. According to their measurements, Mount Everest is 29,031.7 feet tall, about two feet taller than the most widely accepted height. The result comes one year after China’s top leader Xi Jinping announced that China and Nepal would jointly measure the mountain, which sits on the border of Nepal and Tibet. Everest’s height is slowly increasing because of the shifting of Earth’s tectonic plates, and "The project was a matter of national pride for Nepal and a prestigious undertaking for the Nepali government. I feel very proud that we were able to complete it successfully," says Susheel Dangol, Deputy Director General at Nepal's Department of Survey, to Measuring a mountain is a years-long undertaking. Nepalese surveyors trekked up the south side of the mountain in 2019, and took their measurements at the peak at 3:00 a.m. local time to avoid crowds of climbers, Freddie Wilkinson reports for Surveyors used a combination of satellite measurements, taken with GPS and the Chinese counterpart Beidou, and triangulation, taken with laser theodolites, which use angles to measure the height difference between two points. At the summit, chief survey officer of the project Khimlal Gautam used ground-penetrating radar to measure how much snow was packed between their feet and the mountain’s actual rocky peak. It was the first time that a surveyor had gathered data from the mo...