Mt Qomolangma new height put at 8,848.86m
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THE new height of Mount Qomolangma, the world’s highest peak, is 8,848.86 meters, according to a joint announcement by China and Nepal yesterday.
The figure, including the height of the snowcap, was confirmed by surveyors from the two countries, which reached a consensus last year to jointly declare the remeasured height of the peak and conduct scientific research on it. The height is a bit more than the two countries’ previous calculations
Chinese President Xi Jinping, exchanging letters with his Nepali counterpart Bidya Devi Bhandari yesterday, called Mount Qomolangma, also known as Mount Everest, “an important symbol of the China-Nepal traditional friendship.”
For more than a year, the two countries’ survey teams have overcome all kinds of difficulties, solidly carried out their work, and finally reached a conclusion on the snow height based on the International Height Reference System, Xi said.
A Chinese survey team reached the summit of Mount Qomolangma on May 27 and remeasured the peak height. Nepali surveyors reached the top of the mountain in May 2019.
The joint announcement of the new peak height is of great significance in carrying forward the undertakings of the predecessors to the future and showcasing the high level of the continuous development of China-Nepal relations, Xi noted.
Mount Qomolangma straddles the China-Nepal border, with its northern part located in Xigaze in southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region.
As the movements of the Indian and Eurasian plates continue, regular remeasurement of the peak needs to be updated. Theoretically, this should be done every 10 to 15 years, said Dang Yamin, who is in charge of the coordination of height measurement technologies.
Mountaineers had suggested a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 2015 which killed nearly 9,000 people in Nepal may have altered the height of the peak.
Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Chinese surveyors have conducted seven rounds of measurement and scientific research on Mount Qomolangma.
A Chinese measurement in 2005 determined that the rock height of the summit was 8,844.43 meters, about 3.7 meters less than the 1954 estimate.
Nepal had never previously measured the height of Mount Everest on its own but had used the 8,848 meters estimate made by the survey of India in 1954 that includes snow.
The latest measurement was markedly more scientific, reliable, and innovative than the previous one in 2005 thanks to the application of multiple homegrown technologies, including the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, according to Chinese Ministry of Natural Resources.
There was no doubt that Everest would remain the highest peak because the second highest, Mount K2, is only 8,611 meters tall.
Garrett Madison of the US-based Madison Mountaineering company said he was excited about climbing the “new heights” on Mount Everest next year. “Surely some new records for climbing the ‘highest Everest’ will happen in 2021,” the 42-year-old ten times Everest summiteer told Reuters in a text message. “Hopefully I get Everest summit #11 in 2021!”
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