How high is Mount Everest? Nepal survey aims to answer huge question

Scientists have repeatedly tried to get on top of the question since the Himalayan peak was surveyed in 1856 – but now Nepal has decided 'to take the initiative'
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Mount Everest
An aerial view of the Mount Everest range 87 miles north-east of Kathmandu. Nepal has begun a project to re-measure the world's tallest peak in an attempt to end confusion about its exact height. Photograph: Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty Images

As the Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain knows, it is hard enough measuring a protuberance in Wales.

So it is entirely understandable that cartographers, surveyors and mountain climbers have been struggling since 1856 to calculate the exact height of Mount Everest.

In an attempt to settle the matter once and for all, Nepal this week launched a two-year geodesic survey to measure the Himalayan peak.

The world's tallest mountain was named after British surveyor George Everest in 1856, when a trigonometric survey put its height at 8,840 metres (29,002ft).

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

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

It does not help either that due to shifting tectonic plates, Everest grows by 4mm every year.

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

"China, in its border talks with Nepal, has always been demanding to measure the rock height without snow of Mount Everest," Gopal Giri, a government spokesman, told Kathmandu's Himalayan Times.

Now that Nepal has become technologically capable of measuring the mountain, Giri added, there was no need to depend on measurements taken by foreigners.

Nepalese surveyors armed with GPS instruments have already left for three high altitude campsites to begin the geodesic survey.

Raja Ram Chhatkuli, the country's surveyor general, also made it clear that measuring Everest was a nationalist enterprise.

"Nepal has to take the initiative and ascertain the height so that we can ourselves officially declare the height," he told Xinhua news agency.

The Nepalese would like Everest to be officially higher than the Chinese measurement, not too unlike the good people of the fictional Ffynnon Garw village in the Hugh Grant film, who wanted their hill to be a mountain.

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

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

China is a powerful neighbour, and somebody in Kathmandu had woken up to the fact that nationalist posturing across the Himalayas would be counterproductive.

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