The new height of Mount Everest

The height of the world’s highest peak Mount Everest revealed is 8848.86 meters.

Nepal and China have finally reached an agreement on the exact height of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world that straddles the border between Nepal and China. On Tuesday, the two countries resolved the decades-long dispute over whether to take the height of the snow or the height of the rock of the world’s tallest mountain. The new height was jointly announced by Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in the middle of a virtual press conference. The latest measurement has added 86 centimeters to the height of the highest peak in the world. Now it is 8,848.86 meters.

The new official height also quells speculations by geologists that Everest’s height may have been lowered and the mountain had moved south after the twin earthquakes of 2015. The speculations had, in fact, reignited the dispute, after which Nepal finally assigned a team for the first time to measure the peak in 2019.

In the midst of the May pandemic, a year after the Nepalese team finished their fieldwork, Chinese surveyors reached the top of Everest to re-measure the peak, after which both teams finally reached a conclusion on the snowy height based on the International Height Reference System. The revised elevation that has used both traditional and modern technology is accurate to within centimeters, according to the Research Department.