Kathmandu: The height of the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest, is 8848.86 metres, Nepal and China jointly announced Tuesday. The new revision ended a long-standing debate about the height of the world’s tallest mountain. The new height of Mount Everst is 86 cm – a little less than three feet – more than the previous measurement, Nepal’s foreign minister Pradeep Gyawali said at a press briefing.
The height of the mountain peak that straddles the Nepal-China border was announced simultaneously by Gyawali and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in here as well as in Beijing. This was reported by the ‘Kathmandu Post’. “This is a historic day,” Gyawali said, while making the much-awaited announcement.
Nepal had been working on measuring Mt Everest’s height since 2011. Till the revision, Mt Everest’s official height had been kept at 8,848 metres (29,028 feet). The measurement was done by the Survey of India in 1954.
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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. At that juncture Mount Everest was not known as the highest peak of the world. During computations, the mean computed height of Peak XV came out to be 8839.80 metres. 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.
