Everest Is a Little Smaller Now

Future climbers won't notice, but Mount Everest is a tiny bit shorter because of the earthquake in Nepal. Radar images show that it shrank about an inch, reports the Weather Channel. The change may have been greater had the world's tallest peak been directly above the fault line, notes Phys.org, but as things stand, Everest is still at 29,029 feet. The situation is radically different near the capital of Kathmandu, which rose at least 3 feet.

"That's one of the reasons why Kathmandu has so much damage," a geophysicist from the UK's University of Leeds tells LiveScience. Measurements before and after the 7.8-magnitude quake show that an area 75 miles long and 30 miles wide rose 3 feet, and the rise peaked just 10 miles from the city. Scientists are poring over the radar images not only to get a better sense of the quake's "anatomy," reports the BBC, but to better predict where the next big one may hit. (Click to read about a teen's rescue after five days.)