He continued upward until he reached Bishop Rock, a landmark named for Barry Bishop, a former National Geographic magazine editor and member of the first U.S. The team was already planning the mangled equipment's replacement, an improved weather station, and Tenzing was to survey a new, higher location for it. Tenzing then proceeded up to the Balcony Station to assess the damage and retrieve its data logger.īut he wasn’t done. And so it wasn’t until last year that Tenzing and another Sherpa could finally visit the Everest network for its first official maintenance.Īt the lower stations, they installed new sensors, replaced batteries, and inspected fittings and bolts. Video by Baker Perryīut before the technology could be repaired, COVID halted all activity on the south side of Mount Everest in 2020. The team members divvied up the pieces of the disassembled weather station to carry it to the top. “We saw a gust of about 150-odd-miles an hour right before, so there’s no wondering what happened,” Matthews says. For example, Matthews discovered that the amount of oxygen available to climbers on the upper slopes varies considerably with the weather.Īltogether, the network was gathering information that could directly impact not only the lives of mountaineers and Sherpa, but also the 1.6 billion people who rely on freshwater from the region-until its components began to fail.Īt about the same time the Balcony Station stopped transmitting, the wind sensors below it-at the next highest station, on the South Col-went offline as well. "And that can cascade into estimates of how sensitive glaciers are to temperature change.”įrom the weather stations' data, the team also gleaned new information relevant to the hundreds of mountaineers who come to Everest every year. “Effectively, there’s more melting going on than we knew at high altitude, which affects our estimates of how much snow there is," Matthews explains. When all that energy is reflected or absorbed into the mountain’s surface, it causes solid ice to transform directly to vapor, producing significant losses of the ice mass-even at temperatures well below zero. “The summit of Mount Everest may well be the sunniest place on Earth,” Matthews says. In particular, the stations have revealed that high-altitude snow and ice were disappearing much faster than previously assumed. As the 20 data continue to be analyzed, they're yielding surprising conclusions across a diverse field of studies, from human physiology to questions of long-term water supplies and seasonal crop cycles. Video by Arbindra Khadkaįor climate scientists Tom Matthews and Baker Perry, co-leaders of the project, the readings the station broadcasted via satellite link have provided a trove of insights into the meteorological “hidden realm” of the world’s highest mountain and the surrounding Hindu Kush Himalaya. They placed the new station higher on the mountain at a spot known as Bishop's Rock, named for Barry Bishop, a member of the 1963 expedition, the first American team to summit Everest. The team brought a redesigned weather station to replace the one installed in 2019. In it was a data logger that contained the last data the station had collected before succumbing to the extreme conditions. Kneeling in the snow next to the wrecked station, Tenzing removed a screwdriver and wrench from his pack and began to unfasten a small gray pelican case that was bolted to the mast. It was one of five automatic weather stations placed in May 2019 as part of a partnership between the National Geographic Society Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Nepal and the Nepal government, with funding from Rolex. The Balcony Station had stopped transmitting on January 20, 2020-seven months after it was installed. Tenzing, a 31-year-old electrician and mountain guide, removed his phone from his down suit and began taking pictures of the scene. Now, the mangled seven-foot-tall mast lay on its side, embedded in ice. In reality, it was $30,000 of precision instruments designed to measure wind, humidity, temperature, solar radiation, and barometric pressure. When the station was first assembled and bolted to the rock, it looked like an elaborate backyard antenna festooned with bird-feeders and weather vanes. In front of his crampons, half-buried in the hardened snow, were the remains of the world’s highest weather station. On a postcard day in 2021, Tenzing Gyalzen Sherpa crested the Balcony, a windswept rest spot high on Mount Everest’s Southeast Ridge. This article was supported by Rolex, which is partnering with the National Geographic Society on science-based expeditions to explore, study, and document change in the planet’s most unique regions.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |