Nepal asks for a leg-up to nail Everest's height The Nepalese government has been forced to ask for international assistance in nailing the exact height of Everest, less than a year after it declared it was more than capable of settling the matter once and for all. Nepal – in common with much of the world – uses a 1955 Indian survey figure of 8,848m (29,029ft) as the height …
Himalaya´s height is indeed pretty unstable, but I do not mean the snow. Himalaya has risen, when the then-separatedly moving India crashed head on with pra-Asia. The movement continues to this day and so, the Himalaya is still growing. We have multiple evidence of this, some of it quite interesting. For example, the camel caravans used to walk through some of the himalayans passes. Today the same passes are, ehm, passable only with ice-picks and crampons. Forgive my English.
So, to me it is not much about who was right during last measuring, but rather how much the Everest grew since Mallory/Irvine´s days...
If its all about clocks and timing, in the same way as I understand GPS is, then just get Brian Blessed to nip back up there, and to shout a bit.
Put a couple of microphones on nearby peaks (of known height) and you should be able to work out from the timing interval/triangulation the exact distance and thus the height of Everest.
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No. GPS is pretty awful at doing altitude. Check out the fact that there is a separate vertical accuracy figure in GPS data.
You must be trolling. Do you not think that there are quite a few people who have experimented with this in the 18 years GPS has been operational? Including millions who have such a function embedded in their mobile phones?
This is also the reason that aircraft rely on other mechanisms for collision avoidance.
Ice is a naturally occuring crystalline inorganic solid, and therefore a mineral. It surely follows that the snow on the summit of a mountain counts as part of the mountain.
If the objection is that this means the height of the mountain varies from time to time, that's not a problem restricted to ice. Mountains are mostly gently sinking as their roots melt into the underlying magma, unless the tectonic processes that created them are still ongoing. (Everest is sinking. The Andes are mostly rising). Earthquake activity can create sudden changes. Frost-shattering can cause large chunks of a rocky peak to break off.
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