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Mount Everest is higher than previously thought, Nepal and China said Tuesday, settling a long-running conflict over the height of the world’s highest peak that straddles their shared border.
Kathmandu and Beijing had differed on their exact height, but after each sent an expedition of surveyors to the summit, they agreed that the official height is 8,848.86 meters (29,032 feet), slightly more than their previous estimates.
Everest is an “eternal symbol of … friendship between Nepal and China,” said Nepal’s Foreign Minister Pradeep Kumar Gyawali, announcing the findings of his surveys in a video call with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi.
Nepal had never before measured the height of Mount Everest on its own, but had used the estimate of 8,848 meters (29,028 feet) made by the Survey of India in 1954 that includes snow.
A Chinese measurement in 2005 determined the height of the summit rock to be 8,844.43 meters (29,017 feet), about 3.7 meters (11 feet) less than the 1954 estimate.
Mountaineers had suggested that a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in 2015 that killed nearly 9,000 people in Nepal may have altered the height of Everest.
Nepal, home to another seven of the 14 highest peaks in the world, sent its first survey team in May last year to measure Everest. Then Chinese surveyors climbed to the peak in the spring of this year, when both countries closed the mountain for other climbers due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Damodar Dhakal, a spokesman for the Nepal Department of Studies, said Nepalese surveyors had used the Global Navigation Satellite System to obtain “the precise height” of the giant peak.
Garrett Madison of the American company Madison Mountaineering said he was excited to climb the “new heights” on Mount Everest next year.
“Certainly some new records for climbing ‘Highest Everest’ will be set in 2021,” the 42-year-old ten-time Everest participant told Reuters in a text message. “Hopefully I get to the £ 11 summit of Everest in 2021!”
Many western climbers use the slightly higher elevation of 8,850 meters (29,035 feet) determined in 1999 by the National Geographic Society and the Boston Science Museum, in a survey that used satellite technology to measure the peak.
The 2015 earthquake, which occurred during peak climbing season, triggered massive avalanches that killed 18 people at the base, halting the season’s mountaineering activities.
The following year, climbers who climbed the summit said that an Everest landmark, the Hillary Step, a nearly vertical rock formation 13 meters (40 feet) below the summit, had collapsed from the impact of the worst earthquake ever recorded in Nepal. .
Everest has been climbed 10,184 times by 5,789 people from both sides since it was first climbed by New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953, according to the Himalayan Database, which maintains climbing records.
At least 311 people have died on its slopes.
