The highest point on Earth just got higher. What we know about Mount Everest’s growth
Mount Everest — the highest point on Earth — just got taller, according to Nepal and Chinese authorities, and natural events, including a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck the region in 2015, might be to blame.
The new measurement stands at 29,031.69 feet above sea level, dethroning the previous, most widely accepted measurement of 29,029 feet, officials from both countries announced Tuesday in a joint statement, National Geographic reported.
The new record also settles a long dispute between Nepal and Chinese authorities, both regions of which share portions of the mountain, who couldn’t agree on its precise height for years, the outlet said.
“We can be confident that this is the most accurate height of Everest that we have ever had,” said Susheel Dangol, Nepal’s chief survey officer who headed the project, according to the Washington Post. “It was a huge responsibility on our part. It is a moment of great pride for us.”
Part of the disagreements sprang after a 2005 Chinese survey of Mount Everest found the mountain stood at about 29,015 feet. The Nepal government, which discovered the long-standing measurement of 29,029 feet in 1955, did not recognize this new height, CNN reported.
Following a 2015 earthquake and attempts to conduct their own updated surveys of the mountain, both countries agreed to cooperate in measuring the peak.
Why did Mount Everest get taller?
Geologists say the “exact height of the mountain is a moving target... thanks to shifting tectonic plates and the occasional earthquake,” the Washington Post reported. “The former pushes the mountain’s height ever-so-slightly upward each year, while the latter can cause it to sink.”
But the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that rattled Nepal in April 2015 was no ordinary quake. The event also sent aftershocks, or resulting earthquakes that followed the larger one in the same area in the following days to years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The largest aftershock rang in at 7.3 magnitude just 17 days after the main quake — about 9,000 people died, 23,000 individuals were injured and more than 500,000 homes were destroyed, the USGS said.
After the devastation, geologists went to work to learn if the earthquake affected Mount Everest in any way.
Data from a Chinese “satellite-mapping receiver” installed in 2005 “revealed that Mt. Everest was not taller… or shorter,” the USGS says. “Instead, the motion on the fault had shifted the entire mountain 1.2 inches to the southwest, leaving the height of the mountain still at 29,029 feet.”
However, the mountain’s incredible height lends itself to dangerous climbing conditions, making it difficult to re-survey Mount Everest and discover exactly why the peak rose by two feet, experts say.
