As the climbers community prepares to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the conquest of Mt Everest, there is growing concern about temperatures rising, glaciers and snow melting, and weather getting harsh and unpredictable on the world’s highest peak.
Since the 8,849-metre (29,032-foot) mountain peak was first scaled by New Zealander Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay in 1953, thousands of climbers have reached the peak and hundreds of them lost their lives.
The deteriorating conditions on Everest are raising concerns for the mountaineering community and the people whose livelihoods depend on the flow of visitors.
Researchers found that the highest glacier on the mountain, the South Col Glacier, has lost more than 54 metres (177 feet) of thickness in the past 25 years. A team of 10 scientists visited the glacier and installed two weather monitoring stations — the world’s highest — and extracted samples from a 10-metre-long (33-foot) ice core. The glacier, which sits around 7,900 metres (26,000 feet) above sea level, was found to be thinning 80 times faster than it first took the ice to form on the surface, according to research published in 2022.
The glaciers are losing ice at rates that likely have no historic precedent, said Duncan Quincey, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.
The change is happening “extremely rapidly” he said. “It’s causing challenges for everybody within that region and, of course, for the millions of people who are living downstream,” since much of Southern Asia depends on rivers that originate in the Himalayas for agriculture and drinking water.
Both floods and droughts are likely to become more extreme, he said.
“There’s a huge amount of unpredictability within these systems now, and it makes it very difficult for people who require water at a particular time of year to know that they’re going to have that water available,” he said.
The government and mountaineering community plan to celebrate Everest Day on May 29 with a parade around Kathmandu and a ceremony honouring the climbers and veteran Sherpa guides.
