How high is Mount Everest? Nepal investigation aims to reply to huge

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

How to know English which was up a Hill but came down a mountain, it is difficult enough to measure a bulge in Wales.

So it is totally understandable that cartographers, surveyors and climbers has been struggling 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 geodetic survey two years to measure the Himalayan peak.

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

But when last measured in 2005 by China's State Bureau of surveying and mapping, its height of rock was calculated at 8, 844.43 m (29, 017 ft), plus an ice cap of 3.55 m. that was still less than the elevation determined by an Indian survey in 1955 of 7 cm.

To further complicate matters, in 1999, an American expedition to Everest using GPS technology for the first time has an altitude of 8, rockhead of 850 m and an elevation of ice 1 m higher.

It doesn't help that or due to the displacement of plate tectonics, Everest grows by 4 mm each year.

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

Gopal Giri, a spokesman for the Government, "China, in its discussions of border with Nepal, has always been challenging to measure the height of the rock without snow of Mount Everest," said the Himalayan times of Kathmandu.

Now that the Nepal became technologically capable of measuring the mountain, Giri added, it was not necessary to rely on the measures adopted by foreigners.

Surveyors Nepalese armed with GPS instruments already left three campsites of high altitude begin geodetic survey.

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

"Nepal has to take the initiative and determine the height to allow us to officially declare the height," he told Xinhua News Agency.

The Nepalese would Everest officially higher than Chinese measurement, not much different from the good people of the village of Ffynnon Garw fictional film Hugh Grant, who wanted his hill to be a mountain.

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

"There is nothing very special about this survey," said Chhatkuli. "We hold GEODESIC surveys every year".

China is a powerful neighbor, and someone in Kathmandu had woken up to the fact that the nationalist stance through the Himalayas would be counterproductive.

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