back to article Ben Nevis embiggened by a metre

The Scottish mountain of Ben Nevis is now a officially a metre taller at 1,345m, thanks to Ordnance Survey measurements gleaned using GPS. To be precise, the peak lies at 1,344.527m, just a tad higher than the last reading taken back in 1949, when 20 surveyors took 20 nights* to obtain a rounded figure of 1,344m, using " …

  1. AndyS

    I do hope the gentleman's car wasn't harmed leading up to this discovery.

  2. tiggity Silver badge

    cloudy

    "It took the surveyors 20 nights because they only had three clear nights in that period to get it right."

    That would count as quite good weather in my experience of that area!

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So in a hundred years time...

    ... when sea levels rise 1/2 metre, the guys in 1949 were spot on!

    1. MrT

      Re: So in a hundred years time...

      ' In Scotland we have mixed feelings about global warming because we will get to sit on the mountains and watch the English drown. “More pineapple Huey?” "Well, I've got a coconut here, I'm fine." '

      Frankie Boyle

  4. Dwarf
    Mushroom

    ffs

    I cringe every time I see the word embiggen. Its not a real word, even spell check sticks a handy red squiggle under it to give you a hint.

    Whats wrong with using the Queens English ?

    When did enlarged drop from the vocabulary and why aren't publishers checking for this sort of dumbing down of the language.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: ffs

      Well I for one enjoy a good biggering.

      However, is it possible that they just had a slightly taller tripod in 1949?

      1. Chemist

        Re: ffs

        "However, is it possible that they just had a slightly taller tripod in 1949?"

        They truly were giants in those days !

    2. David Harper 1

      Re: ffs

      It's a perfectly cromulent word.

    3. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
      Stop

      Re: ffs

      For the most cromulent understanding of the topic: https://frinkiac.com/caption/S07E16/102869

    4. Mark 85

      Re: ffs

      From a former tech writer's viewpoint, this is a technical term used by El Reg with a definite meaning so most spell checkers won't understand it. Sort of like a code.word.. but different.

    5. Col_Panek

      Re: ffs

      "enlarged" gets caught in my spam filter

    6. Fungus Bob

      Re: ffs

      "Whats wrong with using the Queens English ?"

      I dunno, maybe Lester's not an old queen.

    7. Jeffrey Nonken

      Re: ffs

      Not a Geisel fan, I take it?

    8. Richard Lloyd

      Embiggened - only in The Simpsons please

      Embiggened is a made up word which should only be used in The Simpsons where it made one of its earliest appearances. I'm surprised Americans use it because it's actually a longer word (both to speak and spell) than the correct word ("enlarged") that's actually in, you know, real dictionaries.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Embiggened - only in The Simpsons please

        "Embiggened is a made up word"

        All words are made up.

        1. PaulAb

          Re: Embiggened - only in The Simpsons please

          Well, I'd like to enter a new word - 'Unbiggend' this is a version 1.0 major release under GPL. it supercedes 'smallerated' ver 0.9

    9. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: ffs

      It's been a while since the hallowed halls here resonated with the groans of the naive prescriptivists. It's like the return of an old, annoying friend.

  5. Rusty 1
    Coat

    I'm glad

    I'm glad I climbed it last year. Harder work now!

    1. Chemist

      Re: I'm glad

      "I'm glad I climbed it last year. Harder work now!"

      Glad I climbed it in 1968 - definitely harder work now !

    2. Zebo-the-Fat

      Re: I'm glad

      Harder to climb in winter, another 2 or 3 meters of snow on top!

      1. VinceH

        Re: I'm glad

        I've never climbed it, but I wanted to at some point - but not now, that extra meter will kill me.

        1. Chemist

          Re: I'm glad

          "but not now, that extra meter will kill me."

          Just start off from a small ladder

          1. VinceH

            Re: I'm glad

            How would that help? I'll still have to climb that small ladder!

            Also: *punches self in the face for spelling metre as meter*

            1. MrT

              The ladder doesn't count...

              ... it's not a flight, it's a stoop...

              (Gasping for breath) "It might look like a stoop, but it climbs like a flight"

  6. David Harper 1

    From the Ordnance Survey blog post: "What is amazing is how close the surveyors in 1949 were. The measured height has changed by centimetres, but those centimetres mean we now need to round up rather than down."

    And they did it using only theodolites and chains, the old-fashioned way. Well done, 1949 OS chaps!

    1. JetSetJim
      Thumb Up

      Cracking job by the team back in '49, agreed, but what was the precise height then? Was it 1,343.50, or 1,343.49? The article says it increased by centimetres, but it would be interesting to know precisely how many...

      1. Whiskers

        How much of the difference in height measured is due to 'error' and how much to the mountain actually getting taller? I'm sure I read somewhere that the north of Great Britain is still rising after losing the weight of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. The 1949 surveyors may well have been spot on at the time.

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          I came here to post about the post-glacial bounce-back too. Additionally, do we know if the datum point is still the same as back in '49 or has that been re-calculated too?

          1. Lusty

            Well, they used GPS this time so probably used WGS84. I don't think that was about in 1949 so probably the datum and geoid are different. That said the OS do like to use their old ones though so may have been converting as they went.

            1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

              The OS use WGS84? I think not !

              The Airy spheroid was good enough for our great-great-grandfathers...

        2. weegie38

          The post glacial rebound is about 10cm a century, which would be about 1mm a year. Though the sea level rise is around 1.7mm per year so it merely delays Nevis' drop back into 1344m territory.

  7. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    SNP

    If Scotland had got independence from the fascist English oppressors it would now officially be at least twice as high

  8. This post has been deleted by its author

  9. Aggrajag

    I proposed to my girlfriend at the top of Ben Nevis 20/03/2015 (almost exactly a year ago) during the eclipse when it was EXACTLY 1000 days since I'd asked her out on a date whilst climbing the very same mountain.

    The conditions were appalling; total whiteout, ground and sky totally white, visibility about 5 metres and there was no visible cairn as it was under a couple of metres of snow. No paths, no landmarks and no signs, all purely guided there by a handheld GPS with ordnance survey maps (now out of date I guess!)

    Thanks to a lack of air, hypothermia and frostbite (not really) she said yes.

    1. Col_Panek

      So you threatened to leave her there?

    2. kiwimuso
      Joke

      Pah!

      Mountain? Nah! At a tad under 4500 feet it's more like a large hill. Or half a mountain!!

      When I first went over there and saw what the UKians called a mountain, I laughed myself silly.

  10. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    Inquiring minds want to know

    Was it an Englishman who went up the hill?

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Does anyone know if the heights of such mountains change much due to expansion between winter and summer?

    1. Chemist

      "Does anyone know if the heights of such mountains change much due to expansion between winter and summer?"

      In general the temp. a few metres into the ground doesn't vary.

  12. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    Did the 1949 team use the imperial or the metric system? And if they used the imperial system, is it possible that the difference between the 1949 and the current measurements are (partly) due to rounding errors or conversion errors?

    1. JeffyPoooh
      Pint

      "...1949 team....Imperial or the metric...?"

      allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

      The very definition of the 'inch' was in transition during that mid-1900s period. Britain supposedly had adopted the new 25.4mm definition by then, but US Surveyors reportedly continued to use the 1/39.37m inch at least a decade past 1949.

      The difference between these two impacts only the mm digit, the trailing 7 by about ± 2.

      Other errors swamp this out. The movement of the mountain itself swamps it out.

  13. TeeCee Gold badge
    Happy

    Ordnance survey.

    Back in the 19th century they surveyed the whole of India by the time-honoured method of drawing virtual triangles all over it. When finished, they used the side of one triangle as a known baseline to measure the height of Mt Everest as an encore.

    They were actually closer to the right answer than the 20th Century Yank team who famously measured both Everest and K2, erroneously declaring the latter to be taller........

  14. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    "...measured as 1344.527m. I double checked everything..."

    Crikey! Put some ± error bounds on that 1,344,527 mm figure. Geesh!

    Is it even possible to measure the height of the stated phase center of the GPS antenna on the tripod, lovely equipment as I'm sure it is, relative to the selected pebble, to a mm? No.

    Does the mountain itself move up and down on the order of a mm due tidal effects? Probably.

    Is the offset from WGS84 to OSGB36 defined to the mm, in the real world? No.

    The .5m is probably okay. The 0.02 is dubious. The .007 is certainly noise, although strangely appropriate in a James Bond sort of way.

  15. Number6
    Coat

    Perhaps they did the measurements at high tide back in 1949?

    Yes, the rain-proof one.

  16. IainS

    Iain S

    So, if they have gone to the bother of adjusting the 1344 m height of the trig pillar, did they actually also re-measure the height of the mountain at it's highest point (1345 m)?

    If not, then the mountain isn't actually higher, it's just the height of the trig cairn that is higher.

    1. The First Dave

      Re: Iain S

      There is neither a pillar nor a cairn. The article itself mentions that the height was measured from the bed-rock, though not in those exact words.

  17. Malc

    The Earth is flat.

    I've been doing a lot of research on Youtube and actually the Earth is flat. Clearly this re-measurement has omitted this fact.

    On a side note, having been up Ben Nevis more than a few times, I actually conclude that the Earth is mostly Uphill! Given a grant I could conduct more experiments somewhere sunny.

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