Mt Everest: Nepal, China announce revised height to be 8,848.86 metres

Kathmandu: The revised height of Mount Everest, world's highest peak, was announced on Tuesday after a joint measurement was conducted by Nepal and China.

The world's highest peak is 8848.86 metres.

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

According to the earlier measurement done in 1954 by Survey of India, the height of Mt. Everest was 8,848 metres.

China's previous official measurement of 8,844.43m had put the mountain nearly four metres lower than Nepal's.

Mt. Everest stands on the border between China and Nepal, and mountaineers climb from both sides. Officials at Nepal's Foreign Ministry and Department of Survey said that surveyors from the countries had co-ordinated to agree on the new height.

The agreement to jointly announce the new measurement of the Mt. Everest was made during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu last year.

Chinese authorities had previously said that the Mount Everest should be measured to its rock height, while Nepalese authorities argued that the snow top of the summit should be included as well.

The Chinese surveyors had calculated their figure after they measured the mountain in 2005.

Four Nepalese land surveyors spent two years training for the mission, before proceeding to the summit.

Damodar Dhakal, the spokesman at Nepal's Department of Survey, said, "Before this, we had never done the measurement ourselves. It is the first measurement conducted by us. Now that we have a young technical team, we could do it on our own."

Nepal's lead surveyor Khimlal Gautam had lost his toe due to frostbite while on the summit to install height-measuring equipment last year.

Some geologists have suggested that the major earthquake in 2015 of 7.8 magnitudes may have had an impact on Mt. Everest's height. Scientists had found that other Himalayan peaks such as Langtang Himal, mostly to the North of Kathmandu and close to the epicentre, had reduced in height by approximately a metre after the earthquake.

Others have argued that Mt Everest, unlike other peaks, may have actually grown over the time because of the shifting tectonic plates.

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