India is remeasuring Mount Everest to find out if it shrunk after earthquake
Mount Everest, the world's tallest mountain, might have shrunk after a devastating earthquake in the region two years ago, believe some scientists. India is sending an expedition to "remeasure" the mountain, PTI reported.
The April 2015 quake in Nepal, which measured 7.9 on the Richter scale and affected 80 million people, has been termed the worst in 80 years. Some scientists claim that the height of a swathe of the Himalayan mountains, including the Everest, have dropped by around one meter after that.
"The primary stretch that had its height dropped is a 80-100km stretch of the Langtang Himal (to the northwest of the capital, Kathmandu)," Richard Briggs, a research geologist with the United States Geological Survey, told the BBC.
Mt. Everest's most-accepted height, given by the Survey of India, is 8,848 m (29,028 ft). It was arrived at 62 years ago by India's central mapping agency.
And now the Indian government plans to send a second survey team to assess changes in the mountain after the catastrophe. However, Nepalese officials have told the BBC that no agreement had been reached on allowing an Indian team access to the region.
But India's Surveyor General, Swarna Subba Rao, told PTI: "I have got all the approvals. MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) also done. If the Surveyor General of Nepal has come here [for the conference in Hyderabad], I will have a meeting with him. As I see it, we plan to send [the expedition team] in two months."
A combination of GPS measurement and triangulation would be used to measure the exact height of the mountain. It would take about a month for observation and another 15 days for computation and declaration of data, the Surveyor General added.
Topics Nature
