Did an earthquake shrink Mount Everest?

Mount Everest from an aerial view taken over Nepal on Oct. 21, 2005.

According to India’s surveyor-basic, a faculty of thought has grown that Earth’s highest peak, Mount Everest, has shrunk.

“We are sending an expedition to Mount Everest,” stated the official, Swarna Subba Rao, on the sidelines of the Geospatial World Forum within the southern Indian metropolis of Hyderabad. He advised the BBC that his surveyors would work with the federal government of Nepal, which shares the mountain with China, to “remeasure” the hulking rock.

The wrongdoer of the attainable shrinking is considered the large earthquake that devastated Nepal in April 2015.

Smithsonian Magazine reported shortly after the quake that satellite tv for pc knowledge was used to find out that enormous swaths of land in Nepal had risen greater than 30 ft, whereas others had dropped. Conflicting studies on what has occurred to the precise altitude of Everest’s peak depart appreciable doubt.

The final time the mountain was measured was greater than six many years in the past, additionally by the Survey of India. They discovered that Everest rose to 29,028 ft above sea degree. It is unlikely that a new survey would discover that Everest’s peak was in truth under 29,000 ft, however measuring know-how has considerably improved, leaving room for discrepancies.

No different peak on the planet lies above 29,000 ft, and the present estimation of Everest’s peak places it 777 ft greater than the world’s second-highest mountain, K2, in Pakistan.

This time round, scientists will measure Everest’s peak utilizing GPS gear and triangulation methods. The observational knowledge would take a month to gather and one other 15 days to compute, stated Rao.

Everest belongs to the Himalayan Range, a comparatively younger chain of peaks that, on the entire, are rising quickly because the Indian subcontinent subducts underneath Eurasia. Almost all the world’s highest peaks rise there.

The above publish is reprinted from Materials offered by Smithsonian Magazine.