A Permanent GPS Station at the Pyramid Everest Laboratory

The Pyramid Laboratory of the Italian EV-K2-CNR Committee is located at about 6 hours trek from Mt. Everest Base Camp in Nepal, along the Khumbu glacier. Geologically it lies on the granites of the High Himalayas and in front of the ridge with the highest peaks on Earth: Everest, Nuptse, Lhotse etc.

In spring and autumn the Laboratory is visited by researchers that carry out scientific projects in medicine, physiology, glaciology and also sedimentology in the several lakes of the surrounding areas.

All through the year the laboratory hosts a meteorological station that collects data for the study of the development and the variations of the monsoon along the Himalayan chain. A seismological station and a beacon of the french DORIS (Doppler Orbitography System) positioning system have also been operating in the Lab for the last 12 years.

Since April 2003 a Leica 530 GPS station has been in permanent operation taking continuous recordings at 30 sec. intervals. The Leica 504 choke ring antenna was placed on a large boulder on a small hill overlooking the Laboratory. This location is the same as was used in 1992 for the first GPS measurement of Mt. Everest.

The Leica 530 receiver, powered by solar panels, is in a closed cabinet near the GPS antenna and sends the data via radio to the Pyramid Lab where they are stored into a portable computer and from where the steering Control Station programme forwards them to Italy via Internet in Rinex format.

The raw data stored in daily files can be found on the web site

http://www.units.it/~telegeom

This GPS station can be a reference for other researchers operating in the area and in the long term will provide information on the tectonic movements of the area if compared with other GPS Stations located in Nepal, Tibet and in India.