All of Colorado’s 14ers just shrank
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Revised height measurement systems have shifted Colorado's 14er height rankings
New measurement systems from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration account gravity’s effect on sea level, correcting decades-old height miscalculations
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All of Colorado’s 14ers just shrank
Clip | 4m 14sVideo has Closed Captions
New measurement systems from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration account gravity’s effect on sea level, correcting decades-old height miscalculations
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipAlright, so where do I start?
So everything in Colorado is about two feet too high.
On average, everything will change by about two feet.
All of the 14er heights.
It turns out there's another complication where some of the old initial surveys were just a bit wrong.
And so some 14ers are going to drop by more than two feet.
On a state capitol, there's a step that says you are one mile high above sea level.
They'll have to erase that, and put that marker about two steps up.
I don't know if you'll wake up one morning and you'll see the heighth of your house change, but it's, basically that will happen.
Our agency is tasked with basically defining and maintaining the national spatial reference system.
So this is latitude, longitude, elevations and then strangely gravity.
And our project is to completely redefine the height system.
Sea level has been a great place to call zero elevation.
In the United States at least, sea level goes back to Thomas Jefferson getting started trying to map out the coast at first.
So they went around the coast putting in what are called tide gauges.
And so you can see how high is everything relative to that.
And they're keeping track of height differences from some starting point to some end point.
And if your starting point is one of those tide gauges, you can then inchworm your way inland and figure out how high you are above sea level.
But as we kind of mentioned, that's half the story.
The other half is the gravity part.
The reason you need to know both is because water reacts to a combination of gravity and heighth.
So in Colorado, for example, once sea level gets to the Rocky Mountains, the mass of the mountains would pull sea level up under Colorado.
And they're places where there's not mountains that imaginary sea level would be lower.
That value of gravity times heighth, if we know where that is, we can use that as our zero system.
So the old height system, which is still the current height system, is called the North American Vertical Datum of 1988.
Crews of people with rulers and telescopes walked inland, keeping track of the heights as they went, and literally it took something like 50, 60 years.
And that's how things have stood since the late 80s.
Coincidentally, though, in the 1980s GPS was invented.
But G.P.S.
doesn't know about gravity.
GPSs positioning.
is relative to something that's called the ellipsoid.
It's the average shape of the Earth.
From the side, it looks like an Australian rules football.
We need something that tells us about that gravity part of it.
So what we do is we have where sea level is under Colorado.
That takes gravity into account.
You then - now, its simple addition.
You say, okay, I take my ellipsoid height from GPS and I take the difference from the ellipsoid to the sea level that our agency is providing.
I now know my height above sea level in a way that takes gravity into account.
In some level, our new system really doesn't even depend where the water is anymore.
We just pick a value of gravity times heighth.
It turns out it's much easier to do, and it's also depending how you count, something like ten times more accurate.
What happens in Colorado is because that predicted sea level under Colorado is higher than you would otherwise think without gravity, everything in Colorado is now not as high above sea level as it used to be.
We won't lose any 14ers, which makes me really happy.
There's some shifting of the order.
The new lowest 14er is Huron Peak.
It used to be Mount Sunshine.
So in our lifetime, in our children's children's lifetime, we'll still always have 14ers.
The North American Vertical Datum of 1988 will be replaced probably in 2025 or 26 at the latest, by what's called the North American Geopotential Datum of 2022 or NAPGD2022.
Your phone, when you say you know, “How high is it to the top of this peak?” on my climbing app, it'll have the new datum built into it, so it'll tell you, you know, your new heights above sea level.
I don't know if when they're going to repaint all the elevation signs around the town limits, but, that can come later.
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