The world’s tallest mountain just had a couple of feet added to it.

Mount Everest sits on the Nepal–Tibet border. In Nepalese, it’s called Sagarmatha, meaning “the head of the sky.” In Tibetan, it’s called Chomolungma, “goddess earth mother.”

It got its English name to honor George Everest, who led the survey to map and measure the peaks of India and Nepal in the mid-1800s.

His team used triangulation to sight from point to point, thousands of times, to work out elevations. In 1856, they determined the height of Everest to be 29,003 feet.

That height stuck for a century, until an English-Nepali team finally climbed the mountain, and the survey increased its height to 29,029.

In 1999, the National Geographic Society used a GPS receiver to measure a slightly higher height of 29,035 feet.

But Nepal rejected this new technology and decided to survey it themselves, combining old and new methods.

In 2017, Nepalese climbers placed their own GPS receiver on the summit, then also triangulated its height using laser-guided telescopes from 12 other mountain tops. And China did the same from the Tibetan side.

Then, in a rare collaboration between the countries, they shared their data to arrive at a higher official height for Sagarmatha/Chomolungma: 29,031.69 feet. And that last foot is a doozy!