India sending team to see if Mt. Everest is shrinking
Amid speculation Nepal’s deadly 2015 earthquake might have caused Mount Everest to shrink, India is dispatching an expedition to the summit to confirm whether the world’s highest mountain is still 8,848 metres.
“We are remeasuring it,” India’s surveyor general, Swarna Subba Rao, told Indian media outside a geospatial forum this week.
He added, “t here is a doubt in the scientific community that it is shrinking.”
India and Nepal both note Everest’s official height as 8,848 metres, a figure first obtained by Indian surveyors in 1955 — two years after the mountain was first summited by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
However, satellite data collected after a 7.8- magnitude earthquake struck Nepal in April 2015 showed the mountain was 2.8 centimetres smaller. UNAVCO, a non- profit geoscience research consortium, suggested the cause was a relief of strain in the Earth’s crust. The force of the shaking is also believed to have shifted the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu several metres to the south. The quake killed 9,000 people and extensively damaged the city.
The true height of the peak has long been in dispute.
A 1975 Chinese expedition found the mountain was 8,848.13 metres. A second Chinese expedition in 2005 placed a beacon at the peak that calculated the height at 8,844.43 metres.
In 1 999, a U. S. t eam dubbed Everest- Millennium anchored a GPS unit to the mountain’s peak, which found the height to be 8,850 metres.
The discrepancies are partly due to surveyors measuring the buildup of ice and snow, rather than the mountain’s “rock height.”
Mount Everest may also be going up or down with the movement of the Earth. The tectonic f orces that created the Himalayas are constantly causing the landscape to shift.
Surveying expeditions to Everest aren’t cheap and can be extremely risky. The average Everest climber faces a one in 60 chance of dying on the mountain.
Surveyors insist it’s important to maintain precise readings to keep tabs on the region’s shifting geology.
“What attracts people’s attention is not only the height of the peak, but also changes in its height and geological changes in the area, which will have a great impact on the global biosphere, atmosphere and lithosphere,” Zhang Yanping, director of China’s 2005 expedition, said at the time.
The Indian survey, which will comprise five members setting out as early as March, will use a combination of both high- and l ow- tech methods to get a reading.
A team of climbers will place a GPS tracker at the summit. Surveyors will then use the old- fashioned method of triangulation. Scientists will use instruments to sight the peak from a known distance, then calculate its height based on the angle of their observation.
It was a 19 th century triangulation that first established Mount Everest as the world’s highest peak at 29,002 feet (8,839.2 metres). Legend has it the reading came in at exactly 29,000 feet, but surveyors tacked on an extra two feet reasoning that nobody would believe them otherwise.
While Mount Everest is indisputably the world’s highest point above sea level, purists still like to note the mountain loses its “world’s tallest” title when its height is measured outward from the centre of the Earth.
That honour belongs to the comparatively littleknown Ecuadorean volcano of Chimborazo. Given the Earth is slightly wider around the middle, it has the effect of thrusting land at the equator further up.