REAL LIFE NEWS: THE MOUNTAIN THAT GREW BY A METRE
by Hazed
The highest mountain in the United Kingdom, Ben Nevis in Scotland, is bigger than we thought.
Experts recently measured the peak using the best modern GPS technology and determined that it is actually a metre taller than it was before. It’s not that the mountain has actually grown, it’s just that modern measuring technology using GPS is a lot more precise than the old method which used theodolites deriving angles from a system of national benchmarks.
Actually the difference is considerably less than a metre, but thanks to the way numbers are rounded up or down, a few centimetres difference translates as a metre in whole numbers.
Ben Nevis was officially measured in 1949 and its height set as 1,344 metres, rounded down by knocking off the centimetres. The new measurement comes out at 1,344.527m which is then rounded up to 1,345 – making the mountain officially one metre taller than it was.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35837773
