The History of Surveying the Summit
We think of the height as a fixed fact, but the official elevation of the Mount Everest summit has changed many times. It involves politics, geology, and trigonometry.
In the 1850s, the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India calculated the height as 29,002 ft. They actually calculated 29,000 exactly but added 2 feet so people wouldn't think they just estimated. It was renamed Everest later.
An Indian survey in the 1950s established the famous 8,848m figure. This became the gold standard for decades of Mount Everest expeditions.
In 2020, Nepal and China jointly announced a new height: 8,848.86m. They used GPS and gravity data. The mountain is technically growing due to plate tectonics.
No matter the exact decimal, it remains the ultimate challenge on Earth.
