The devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake that hit Nepal April 25 caused Mount Everest to move 1.18 inches to the southwest.
The tallest mountain in the world has actually been moving to the north at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year, China's National Administration of Surveying, Mapping, and Geoinformation reports, and also rises .1 inch a year due to the collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates, which pushes the ground up.
Near Kathmandu, above the slipping fault, the ground was lifted by about 3 feet, Richard Briggs of the U.S. Geological Survey told Live Science, but further north the ground abruptly dropped. "Movements on this fault will have affected nearby faults, and some of the faults will be promoted closer to failure [causing a quake], and some will be pulled further away from failure," Briggs said. "The trouble we have is the timing part. We don't know where all these faults are in their kind of 'clocks' and how close they were to kind of going anyway."
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