Team of Nepali climbers set to measure Mt Qomolangma
Nepal survey chief Khim Lal Gautam (right) and his team, Suraj Singh Bhandari (second right), Yubaraj Dhital (left) and mountain guide Tshiring Janbu Sherpa, check the equipment before leaving on an expedition to remeasure Mount Qomolangma’s height in Kathmandu yesterday.
Nepal is sending a team of government-appointed climbers up Mount Qomolangma to remeasure its height, officials said yesterday, hoping to quash persistent speculation that the world’s tallest mountain has shrunk.
Four government surveyors will depart tomorrow for Qomolangma, also known as Mount Everest, which lies on the Himalayan range straddling the border of Nepal and China.
Nepal has so far recognized 8,848 meters as altitude of the mountain, first recorded by an Indian survey in 1954.
Although expeditions from different countries measured the altitude of Qomolangma producing diverse results, Nepal was not part of those expeditions. But a heated debate erupted in the aftermath of a massive earthquake in Nepal in 2015, with suggestions the powerful tremor had knocked height off the lofty peak.
Nepal’s Survey Department commissioned a team of surveyors in 2017 to prepare for a Qomolangma expedition in the hope of putting the matter to rest.
“We are sending a team because there were questions regarding the height” of Qomolangma after the earthquake, said Susheel Dangol, the expedition’s coordinator from the Survey Department.
Four government surveyors have spent two years fine tuning their methodology for measuring the peak, collecting readings from the ground and training for the extreme conditions they will encounter at the top of the world.
They will ascend the treacherous mountain armed with advanced equipment to collect the remaining data to derive the true height of the peak, officials say.
“It will not be easy to work in that terrain, but we are confident our mission will be successful,” said the expedition’s leader and chief surveyor Khim Lal Gautam, who summited Qomolangma in 2011.
It also provides Nepal a chance to measure the fabled mountain for which it is famous, the country having never conducted its own survey.
In May 1999, an American team added 2 meters to Qomolangma’s height when it used GPS technology to survey the peak. That figure is now used by the US National Geographic Society, but otherwise not widely accepted.
China which had first measured the height of the mountain in 1975 reassessed the summit in 2005 measuring the height peak’s rock base 8,844.43 meters covered by 3.5 meters snow.
Nepal rests on a major fault line between two tectonic plates: one bearing India that pushes against the other carrying Europe and Asia, the process that created the Himalayas.
