Nepal quake shifted Mount Everest by three centimetres

The devastating April 25 earthquake and the aftershocks thereafter have moved Mount Everest by 3cm, media reported on Tuesday.

According to China's National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation, the 7.9-magnitude earthquake that hit Nepal, shifted Mount Everest by three cm to the southwest, China Daily reported.

Since 2005, the administration has been setting up satellite geodetic survey points on the north side of Everest that enable scientists to measure the speed of tectonic movement.

The devastating earthquake that rocked Nepal on April 25 and another measuring 7.3 on May 12, killed over 9,000 people and injured more than 21,000 others. "The mountain has been constantly moving to the northeast, and the earthquake made it bounce a little bit in the opposite direction," Xu Xiwei, deputy head of the Institute of Geology at the China Earthquake Administration in Beijing, said.

The second 7.5-magnitude quake in Nepal on May 12, however, did not move the mountain either horizontally or vertically. During the past decade, the mountain moved 40cm to the northeast at a speed of four cm a year and rose three cm at a speed of 0.3 cm a year.

With IANS