Did Mount Everest really shrink? Taking a second look

Thursday, January 26, 2017, 9:24 AM - Aside from killing thousands of people, the Magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck Nepal in 2015 made headlines for another reason: After the shaking stopped, some measurements suggested Mount Everest had shrunk by three centimetres.

Scientists came to that conclusion using data from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1A satellite (another survey found Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal were Everest is located, had actually risen by about a metre). At 8,848 m in total, the mountain remains the world's highest.

However, Indian officials have expressed skepticism about the claim. The BBC says the mountain's accepted height before the quake came from an Indian survey more than 60 years ago, and the country's surveyor-general says a new expedition is planned for the next two months. 

"We don't know what happened, there's been no confirmed report," Swarna Subba Rao told the BBC. "Some scientists do believe it has shrunk. But there's a school of thought it may have grown."

A ground or air survey can confirm the height of the peak using GPS and triangulation, but though Rao says Nepal has agreed to the survey, a spokesman for the Nepali government told media no such agreement has been made, and Nepal plans its own survey.

The 2015 earthquake killed more than 9,000 people and left 3.5 million homeless, according to the Independent.

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