Posted on 04/08/2010 8:36:50 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
Communist China and Nepal have settled a 150-year-old dispute over the height of Mount Everest, agreeing that the "snow height" of the world's highest peak is 29,029 feet.
The great mountain lies on the border between the two countries and they have disagreed for years over its exact height, which Nepal had put at 29,029 feet (8,848 metres) - nearly 13 feet more than the measurement used by China.
However, officials revealed in talks in Kathmandu this week that the two measurements referred to different things - one to the height of Everest's rock and the other to the height of its snow cap.
"The Chinese side - led by Li Qingyuan - accepted Nepal's claim that the snow height of Mount Everest is 8,848 metres, while the Nepali side recognised the Chinese claim that the rock height of the mountain is 8,844.43 metres," a senior official at Nepal's Department of Surveys told the Kathmandu Post daily.
Thousands of people have climbed Mount Everest since the first ascent in 1953 by Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary, but its exact height has been a source of dispute ever since the first measurement was made in 1856.
The broadly accepted height of 8,848 metres was first determined by an Indian survey in 1955, and measured the mountain's snow cap, rather than the rock beneath it.
To complicate matters, geologists believe Everest is growing as India is gradually pushed beneath China and Nepal by the shifting of the continental plates.
In May 1999 an American expedition used GPS technology to measure a height of 8,850 metres and this figure is now used by the US National Geographic Society, although it has not been officially accepted by Nepal.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
It sounds like the GPS measurement wins.
Who cares, it’s the highest!
Hrummphhh ....
The world’s tallest mountain is Mauna Kea on the big island in Hawaii.
It was cold.
There was Global Shrinkage.
Anthropomorphic Global Shrinkage.
That’s my alibi, and I’m sticking to it.
Well, I suppose that depends on where you put the zero mark.
We should blast the top off and make it equal with all other mountains.
Ask Hillary, she’s related.
“The world’s tallest mountain is Mauna Kea on the big island in Hawaii.”
It all depends on how you measure, and from what ‘zero’ point. If you can get SCOTUS to agree that BO, the nadir of nadirs, was born in either Kenya or Indonesia and is ineligible, you can have the nadir be the ocean floor. :)
Wiki says, ‘The peak of Mauna Kea is 13,803 feet (4,207 m) above mean sea level, about 100 feet (30 m) taller than neighboring Mauna Loa and about 30,000 feet (9,100 m) above its base on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.[3][4] By this measurement, Mauna Kea is the world’s tallest mountain, taller than Mount Everest, which is the highest mountain above sea level.[5]’
Rock beats snow, and scissors.
I’d like to see it top Obama’s ego.
It’s shrinking every year because global warming is raising the sea level!
That'sno height
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