The Year Climate Change Closed Everest
The deadly avalanche on Everest earlier this month wasn't technically an avalanche. It was an "ice release"—a collapse of a glacial mass known as a serac. Rather than getting swept up by a rush of powdery snow across a slope, the victims fell under the blunt force of house-sized ice blocks tumbling through the Khumbu Icefall, an unavoidable obstacle on the most popular route up Everest. The worst accident in the mountain's history has effectively ended the 2014 climbing season. And some see global warming as the key culprit.
"We need to learn more about what is going on up there. Each day we sit and listen to the groaning and crashing of the glacier."
"I am at Everest Basecamp right now and things are dire because of climate change," John All, a climber, scientist, and professor of geography at Western Kentucky University, told me by email. "The ice is melting at unprecedented rates and [that] greatly increases the risk to climbers.""You could say [that] climate change closed Mt. Everest this year," he added.
The Himalayas have been called "the third pole" because the mountain range stores more snow and ice than any other region in the world except the North and South Poles. According to NASA, temperatures in this region have been increasing by 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1980, a rate twice as high as the global average. And the impacts of global warming in the Himalayas are similar to those in the Arctic and Antarctic, with one big difference: Many more people live around this "third pole" than around the North or South Poles.
As a result of this relative population density, climate change is exacting human costs not just on Everest but in the entire region. Some 1.3 billion people depend on rivers that run from Himalayan glaciers like the Khumbu. A couple hundred million of those people live close enough to the mountains to be endangered by devastating wipeouts from glacial flood outbursts, which occur when glaciers melt into lakes and the lakes then overflow—"high-altitude disasters in the making," by one environmental journalist's estimation. There are thousands of glacial lakes in the Himalayas, and many of them are concentrated around Everest.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/the-year-climate-change-closed-everest/361114/
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