Nepal has announced it will conduct a new measurement of the world's tallest mountain, Mount Everest, which straddles the border between Nepal and China.

A spokesman for Nepal's land reforms ministry told reporters Wednesday that the government has decided to use global-positioning satellites to help calculate the mountain's height, which has been disputed in recent years.

Nepal says Everest is 8,848 meters high, but China measures it at 8,844 meters. A 1999 American expedition to Mount Everest measured the mountain at 8,850 meters.

The new measurement will take two years, as GPS satellites gather data from several reference points on the mountain.

Thousands of people have climbed the mountain since New Zealand's Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay reached the summit in 1953.