Nepal, China announce revised height of Mount Everest

Kathmandu/Beijing, December 8

Nepal and China on Tuesday jointly announced that the revised height of the world's highest peak Mount Everest was 8,848.86 metres, about 86 centimetres more than the previous measurement done by India in 1954.

The Nepal government decided to measure the exact height of the mountain amid debates that there might have been a change in it due to various reasons, including the devastating earthquake of 2015.

The new height of Mount Everest, the world's highest peak, is 8,848.86 metres, China and Nepal jointly announced on Tuesday, China's state-run Xinhua news agency said in a brief report.

Nepal recalculates the height of Mount Everest at 8848.86 metres, the country's Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali announced in Kathmandu.

The new height is 86 cm more than the previous measurement. According to the measurement done in 1954 by Survey of India, the height of Mount Everest is 8,848 metres.

According to China's past measurement, the height of Mount Everest is 8844.43 metres which were four metres less than Nepal's calculations.

Earlier, the media reports said Chinese surveyors had conducted six rounds of scaled measurement and scientific research on Mount Everest and released the height of the peak twice in 1975 and 2005, which was 8,848.13 metres and 8,844.43 metres respectively.

In Tibetan language, Mount Everest is known as Mount Qomolangma.

China and Nepal settled their border dispute in 1961 with the boundary line passing through the summit of Mount Everest.

Mount Everest is located in the collision and compression zone between the edges of the Indian plate and the Eurasian plate, where crustal movement is very active.

"Accurately measuring the height of Mount Qomolangma is helpful to the study of the elevation changes of the Himalayas and Qinghai-Tibet Plateau," Gao Dengyi, an atmospheric physicist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences told the Chinese state media earlier. PTI