I do hope the gentleman's car wasn't harmed leading up to this discovery.
Ben Nevis embiggened by a metre
The Scottish mountain of Ben Nevis is now a officially a metre taller at 1,345m, thanks to Ordnance Survey measurements gleaned using GPS. To be precise, the peak lies at 1,344.527m, just a tad higher than the last reading taken back in 1949, when 20 surveyors took 20 nights* to obtain a rounded figure of 1,344m, using " …
COMMENTS
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Friday 18th March 2016 11:50 GMT Dwarf
ffs
I cringe every time I see the word embiggen. Its not a real word, even spell check sticks a handy red squiggle under it to give you a hint.
Whats wrong with using the Queens English ?
When did enlarged drop from the vocabulary and why aren't publishers checking for this sort of dumbing down of the language.
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Saturday 19th March 2016 22:55 GMT Richard Lloyd
Embiggened - only in The Simpsons please
Embiggened is a made up word which should only be used in The Simpsons where it made one of its earliest appearances. I'm surprised Americans use it because it's actually a longer word (both to speak and spell) than the correct word ("enlarged") that's actually in, you know, real dictionaries.
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Saturday 19th March 2016 07:57 GMT MrT
The ladder doesn't count...
... it's not a flight, it's a stoop...
(Gasping for breath) "It might look like a stoop, but it climbs like a flight"
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Friday 18th March 2016 12:04 GMT David Harper 1
From the Ordnance Survey blog post: "What is amazing is how close the surveyors in 1949 were. The measured height has changed by centimetres, but those centimetres mean we now need to round up rather than down."
And they did it using only theodolites and chains, the old-fashioned way. Well done, 1949 OS chaps!
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Friday 18th March 2016 18:26 GMT Whiskers
How much of the difference in height measured is due to 'error' and how much to the mountain actually getting taller? I'm sure I read somewhere that the north of Great Britain is still rising after losing the weight of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. The 1949 surveyors may well have been spot on at the time.
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Friday 18th March 2016 13:53 GMT Aggrajag
I proposed to my girlfriend at the top of Ben Nevis 20/03/2015 (almost exactly a year ago) during the eclipse when it was EXACTLY 1000 days since I'd asked her out on a date whilst climbing the very same mountain.
The conditions were appalling; total whiteout, ground and sky totally white, visibility about 5 metres and there was no visible cairn as it was under a couple of metres of snow. No paths, no landmarks and no signs, all purely guided there by a handheld GPS with ordnance survey maps (now out of date I guess!)
Thanks to a lack of air, hypothermia and frostbite (not really) she said yes.
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Saturday 19th March 2016 22:55 GMT JeffyPoooh
"...1949 team....Imperial or the metric...?"
allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
The very definition of the 'inch' was in transition during that mid-1900s period. Britain supposedly had adopted the new 25.4mm definition by then, but US Surveyors reportedly continued to use the 1/39.37m inch at least a decade past 1949.
The difference between these two impacts only the mm digit, the trailing 7 by about ± 2.
Other errors swamp this out. The movement of the mountain itself swamps it out.
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Saturday 19th March 2016 19:30 GMT TeeCee
Ordnance survey.
Back in the 19th century they surveyed the whole of India by the time-honoured method of drawing virtual triangles all over it. When finished, they used the side of one triangle as a known baseline to measure the height of Mt Everest as an encore.
They were actually closer to the right answer than the 20th Century Yank team who famously measured both Everest and K2, erroneously declaring the latter to be taller........
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Saturday 19th March 2016 22:55 GMT JeffyPoooh
"...measured as 1344.527m. I double checked everything..."
Crikey! Put some ± error bounds on that 1,344,527 mm figure. Geesh!
Is it even possible to measure the height of the stated phase center of the GPS antenna on the tripod, lovely equipment as I'm sure it is, relative to the selected pebble, to a mm? No.
Does the mountain itself move up and down on the order of a mm due tidal effects? Probably.
Is the offset from WGS84 to OSGB36 defined to the mm, in the real world? No.
The .5m is probably okay. The 0.02 is dubious. The .007 is certainly noise, although strangely appropriate in a James Bond sort of way.
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Monday 21st March 2016 09:59 GMT IainS
Iain S
So, if they have gone to the bother of adjusting the 1344 m height of the trig pillar, did they actually also re-measure the height of the mountain at it's highest point (1345 m)?
If not, then the mountain isn't actually higher, it's just the height of the trig cairn that is higher.
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Tuesday 22nd March 2016 12:28 GMT Malc
The Earth is flat.
I've been doing a lot of research on Youtube and actually the Earth is flat. Clearly this re-measurement has omitted this fact.
On a side note, having been up Ben Nevis more than a few times, I actually conclude that the Earth is mostly Uphill! Given a grant I could conduct more experiments somewhere sunny.