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NEPAL-EVEREST
Nepal expedition to remeasure height of Everest: officials
KATHMANDU, April 8, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Nepal is sending a team of government-
appointed climbers up Mount Everest to remeasure its height, officials said
Monday, hoping to quash persistent speculation that the world’s tallest
mountain has shrunk.
Four government surveyors will depart Wednesday for Everest, which lies on
the Himalayan range straddling the border of Nepal and China.
Its official height is 8,848 metres (29,029 feet), first recorded by an
Indian survey in 1954. Numerous other teams have measured the peak, although
the 1954 height remains the widely accepted figure.
But a heated debate erupted in the aftermath of a massive earthquake in
Nepal in 2015, with suggestions the powerful tremor had knocked height off
the lofty peak.
Nepal’s Survey Department commissioned a team of surveyors in 2017 to
prepare for an Everest expedition in the hope of putting the matter to rest.
“We are sending a team because there were questions regarding the height
of Everest after the earthquake,” the expedition’s co-ordinator from the
Survey Department, Susheel Dangol, told AFP.
Four government surveyors have spent two years fine tuning their
methodology for measuring the peak, collecting readings from the ground and
training for the extreme conditions they will encounter at the top of the
world.
They will ascend the treacherous mountain armed with advanced equipment to
collect the remaining data to derive the true height of the peak, officials
say.
“It will not be easy to work in that terrain, but we are confident our
mission will be successful,” said the expedition’s leader and chief surveyor,
Khim Lal Gautam, who summited Everest in 2011.
It also provides Nepal a chance to measure the fabled mountain for which it
is famous, the impoverished country having never conducted its own survey.
In May 1999 an American team added two metres to Everest’s height when it
used GPS technology to survey the peak. That figure is now used by the US
National Geographic Society, but otherwise not widely accepted.
Later, Nepal became embroiled in a diplomatic row with China after the
latter claimed the peak was four metres shorter than the accepted height.
Nepal rests on a major fault line between two tectonic plates: one bearing
India that pushes against the other carrying Europe and Asia, the process
that created the Himalayas.
BSS/AFP/FI/ 1759 hrs