The height of the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest, is 8848.86 metres, Nepal and China on Tuesday jointly announced ending a long-standing debate about the height of the world’s tallest mountain.
The new height is 86 cm – a little less than 3 feet – more than the previous measurement, the country’s Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali said at a briefing on Tuesday.
The height of the mountain peak that straddles the Nepal-China border, was announced simultaneously by Nepal’s Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Kathmandu and Beijing, according to the Kathmandu Post.
“This is a historic day,” Foreign Minister Gyawali said, while making the much-awaited announcement on Tuesday.
Nepal had been working on measuring Mt Everest’s height since 2011.
The official Everest snow height of 8,848 meters (29,028 feet) was measured by the Survey of India in 1954.
The precise height of Mount Everest had been contested ever since a group of British surveyors in India declared the height of Peak XV, as it was initially called, to be 8,778 metres in 1847.
Between 1849 and 1855, the Survey of India made observations from Dehradun, India base to Sonakhoda base in Bihar during which the Himalayan peaks of Nepal were also observed. At that time it was not known that this peak in the Himalayas was the highest in the world. During computations, the mean computed height of Peak XV came out to be 8839.80 metres, and it was later named after Sir George Everest, the ex surveyor-general of India. The widely accepted height of 8,848 metres was determined by the Survey of India in 1954 from Bihar using the trigonometric method.
