The Mount Everest summit point seems to have been moved a minute amount away from the border between China and Nepal. This doesn’t appear to alight with the international border going directly over the top point. As I assume this could be a very carefully surveyed point in terms of location, and not being familiar with the exact border situation in the region, I haven’t touched it yet. What would be the right correction here?
Also, the peaks is tagged with a purely synthetic isolation=20000 tag. Is this kind of arbitrary placeholder value the right way to go about it?
I have found a reference that gives the location of the peak: https://bgo.ogs.it/sites/default/files/pdf/bgta48.1_PORETTI.pdf. Based on this the node needs to be moved about 27m to the SE, which will line up with the GPS traces (that’s right, people have uploaded GPS traces from Everest).
Looks like it was moved away in version 12 and moved back in version 14 (OSM history). Maybe it should be merged back into the border. As a side note this article describes how the new elevation was calculated but most definitely does not give away any location data https://doi.org/10.1080/10095020.2022.2128901
Just wanted to present a case against tying the peak to the border like was done here.
The geometry of borders, unlike peaks, are defined in bilateral agreements between countries.
This can mean than countries agree that the peak of a mountain literally defines the boundary, such that if the peak physically moves, or is re-measured to be located elsewhere, the boundary also moves.
Alternatively, it can also mean that countries agree that a peak will help define the border every 25 years or so, when they officially re-measure the border. But, the border geometry will remain fixed, regardless of the peak’s position, until the next border survey.
I don’t know the details of the bilateral agreement between Nepal and China, but at least in Norway all our borders are re-measured every 25 years and remain fixed by definition in the interim period. So, if one of the peaks on the border gets a more accurately measured position in the mean time, it might then officially reside in a single country for up to 25 years.
Somebody who isn’t as lazy as me should probably research how this border is defined before deciding whether to include the peak in it or not.
There are border markers along the Nepal China border, but not a marker at the summit. Which is not surprising considering that there is about 9.5m of snow and ice they’d have to dig through to get to the mountain so they could install one.