A devastating earthquake that hit Nepal in April moved Mount Everest 3cm to the southwest, but did not change its height, Chinese research published yesterday showed.
The magnitude 7.8 quake reversed the gradual northeasterly course of the world’s highest peak, which straddles Nepal and China, the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation found.
However, its height — usually given as 8,848m — was unchanged by the disaster, according to the research, published in Chinese state media.
Photo: AFP
The report said Everest had moved 40cm to the northeast over the past decade at a speed of 4cm a year and risen 3cm over the same period.
Nepal rests on a major fault line between two tectonic plates — one bearing India pushing northward into a plate carrying Europe and Asia at a rate of about 2cm per year — the process that created the Himalayas.
Roger Bilham, professor of geological science at the University of Colorado, agreed with the Chinese findings.
However, he said the focus should not be on Everest, calling the peak “a lump of uneroded rock that just happens to have survived a little bit higher than all the other rocks in the Himalaya.”
“The Everest region was a mere bystander, and was pulled slightly by this movement by a few centimeters south and a little bit down,” he said in an e-mail.
More than 8,700 people were killed in the April 25 quake and a major aftershock on May 12, which also triggered landslides and destroyed half a million homes, leaving thousands without shelter.
Scientists say the densely populated Kathmandu Valley, about 80km southeast of the epicenter, moved south by nearly 2m during the quake.
Nepal’s government said it had not yet studied the impact on Everest, but that quake-affected areas had moved south.
“We have been studying the core areas affected by the quake and there has been a general southward movement,” said Madhu Sudan Adhikari, head of the survey department in Nepal’s land ministry.
“Kathmandu has shifted south by over 1.5m and was uplifted by nearly a meter,” he said.
Everest’s official height of 8,848m was determined by an Indian survey in 1954, but other measurements have varied by several meters.
China measures the peak 4m lower — by excluding the snowcap — while in 1999 a US team using GPS technology recorded a height of 8,850m, a figure used by the US National Geographic Society.
In 2010, Nepal and China reached a compromise under which Nepal measured the height of Everest’s snowcap at 8,848m and China measured the rock peak at 8,844m.
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