How high is Mount Everest? Investigation into Nepal aims to meet the huge demand

Aerial view of Mount Everest range 87 miles northeast of Kathmandu. Nepal has started a project to measure the highest peak in the world in an attempt to end the confusion about its exact height. Photo: Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty Images

As the English who went up a Hill came down a mountain but knows, it's hard enough to gauge a Protuberance in Wales.

So it is entirely understandable that surveyors and cartographers, mountaineers have struggled since 1856, to calculate the exact height of Mount Everest.

In an attempt to resolve the issue once and for all, Nepal this week launched a two-year-old geodetic survey to measure the peak of the Himalayas.

The world's highest mountain was named after British surveyor George Everest in 1856, when a trigonometric survey put his height to 8.840 metres, 002 ft (29).

But when last measured in 2005 from China's State Bureau of surveying and mapping, its height is calculated in rock 8 m, 844.43 (29, 017 ft), plus an icecap 3.55 m. This was still 7 cm unless the elevation determined by an Indian survey in 1955.

To further complicate matters, in 1999 an American expedition to Everest using GPS technology for the first time got an elevation rockhead's 8, 850 m and a height of 1 m above the ice.

It does not help or because of shifting tectonic plates, Everest grows by 4 millimeters each year.

However, the Chinese insist their calculations are the most accurate – a claim that has caused some friction of high altitude between Nepal and China, as Everest rides their common border.

"China, in his talks with the Nepal border, has always been challenging to measure the height of the rock without snow on Mount Everest," Gopal Giri, a Government spokesman, said Kathmandu's Himalayan Times.

Now that Nepal has become technologically capable of measuring the Mountain Rides added, there was no need to rely on measurements carried out by foreigners.

Surveyors Nepalese armed with GPS instruments, have already left for three high altitude camps begin geodetic survey.

Raja Ram Chhatkuli, Inspector General, the country also made it clear that measure Everest was a nationalist.

"Nepal should take the initiative and to determine the height so that we can officially declare the height," Xinhua news agency said.

Everest the Nepalese would be officially top Chinese measurement, not too unlike the good people of Ffynnon Garw village imaginary in film Hugh Grant, who wanted them to be a mountain Hill.

But in Kathmandu, after the news of the latest project officials downplayed the whole exercise.

"There is nothing very special about this investigation," said Chhatkuli. "We undertake geodetic surveys every year".

China is a neighbor, and someone in Kathmandu had awakened nationalist posturing that through the Himalayas would be counterproductive.

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