Via Eurekalert and the “climate doesn’t kill people, weather does” department
Research considers role of weather in historic Everest tragedy
Their legend has inspired generations of mountaineers since their ill-fated attempt to climb Everest over 80 years ago, and now a team of scientists believe they have discovered another important part of the puzzle as to why George Mallory and Andrew Irvine never returned from their pioneering expedition. The research, published in Weather, explores the unsolved mystery and uses newly uncovered historical data collected during their expedition to suggest that extreme weather may have contributed to their disappearance.
George Mallory and Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine disappeared during their historic 1924 attempt to reach the summit of Everest. The pair were last seen on June 8th on Everest’s Northeast Ridge, before vanishing into the clouds and into the history books. For decades a vigorous debate has raged regarding their climb, their disappearance and if they were successful in reaching the summit.
“The disappearance of Mallory and Irvine is one of the most enduring mysteries of the 20th century, yet throughout the debates surrounding their disappearance the issue of the weather has never really been addressed,” said lead author Professor G.W.K Moore of the Physics Department at the University of Toronto. “Until we completed our study the only information available was an observation by mountaineer Noel Odell, who was climbing behind Mallory and Irvine, who claimed that a blizzard occurred on the afternoon that they disappeared.”
Many writers have since ignored the storm as Odell believed it had only lasted a short time. However the size and extreme height of Everest mean that Odell’s observations have always been difficult to place into context, making the blizzard potentially more significant than first realised.
This latest research focuses on meteorological measurements from the 1924 expedition which the authors uncovered at the Royal Geographical Society library in London. Although the data was published as a table in a 1926 report on the expedition, it was never analysed for information on the disappearance of Mallory and Irvine until this study.
“We analysed the barometric pressure measurements and found out that during the Mallory and Irvine summit attempt, there was a drop in barometric pressure at base camp of approximately 18mbar. This is quite a large drop, in comparison the deadly 1996 ‘Into Thin Air’ storm had a pressure drop at the summit of approximately 8 mbar,” said Moore. “We concluded that Mallory and Irvine most likely encountered a very intense storm as they made their way towards the summit.”
“Mount Everest is so high that there is barely enough oxygen near its summit to sustain life and a drop of pressure of 4 mbar at the summit is sufficient to drive individuals into a hypoxic state,” said Dr. John Semple an experienced mountaineer and the Chief of Surgery at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto.
The authors conclude that with the additional stresses they were under with extreme cold, high winds and the uncertainly of their route, the pressure drop and the ensuring hypoxia contributed to the Mallory and Irving’s death.
This research not only contributes a new, and perhaps final, chapter to the Mallory legend, but is also of importance to modern mountain climbers as the same types of storms and hypoxic stresses continue to confront those who take on the world’s great mountains.
The Mallory and Irvine storm serves as both an example and a warning of the magnitude of the pressure drops that can occur and the severe physiological impact they can have.
“Over the 8 decades since Mallory and Irvine died we have learned a lot about Mount Everest and the risks that climbers attempting to climb it face”, concluded Moore. “The weather is perhaps the greatest unknown and we hope that this line of research will help educate modern climbers as to the risks that they face.”
“”” H.R. says:
August 2, 2010 at 2:49 pm
michel says:
August 2, 2010 at 11:42 am
[…] Read Graves’ account of Mallory in Goodby to All That, and don’t mock. They had courage, they were among the best of their generation. All they lacked was equipment, in Irvine’s case experience, and above all, luck.
I wouldn’t dream of mocking those explorers, but good grief! 80 years later and someone finally thinks to check the weather? Baaad researchers! No cookies for them.
I find the story of the missing photo to be compelling evidence that they made it to the top and died coming down. I’m not sure we’ll ever know. “””
Well also it is known that they had a Kodak Camera with them; and the recovery party searched for that hoping it might still have photos of a summit kind, saved for posterity. I believe the camera has not been found.
As for Jake Norton’s “informed speculation”; informed or not it is still speculation; and I see no purpose in dressing it up like a Clive Cussler Thriller.
Evidently they fell; nobody can ever know who slipped or why; it could have been a snow/ice fall that bowled them both off.
I go along with the fall while tied together; but Mallory could easily have struck his head on a rock while he was slipping down that slope; I’m not convinced of an ice axe blow. I’m surprised he could even be alive after a fall, since I don’t think he simply slid to his final resting place.
RE: Mike Hebb: (August 2, 2010 at 2:26 pm ) “When someone calls for a rescue (nowadays on their cell phone) they should provide a credit card number rather than make the public pay for the maintenance of all the rescue squads.”
I believe they can claim that part of the taxes that *they* paid, or were liable to pay, were part of a government provided, citizen group-insurance policy that entitles them to be rescued or recovered.
Perhaps it would be fair to charge people extra access fees for the right to enter or access unusually high-risk or high-cost rescue-recovery areas on their own. I would hope that the national park service is already doing this.
Former trained, tested, and certified Basic Mountaineering Instructor says. Hypoxia + hypothermia (windchill in an extreme storm with 1924 clothing technology) + exhaustion. In all three, the first thing you lose is your reasoning abilities. Add to that, extreme whiteout conditions. Speculatively, iced up eyes/goggles. People come to grief on flat ground in the Blue Northers of the Middle West. High on a steep unmapped mountain, in those conditions, death is inescapable. They gambled, they lost.
The Scott Antarctic party was delayed and finally defeated by powerful storms. They were 11 miles from their nearest food cache when a storm put them in their tent for the last time. They gambled, they lost.
Conjecture can take us in many directions. Will we ever know for certain? However, through the use of a panorama camera and the Internet we can all see what those who make it to the top of Everest see. At the Astronomy Picture of the Day site they have just such a photo: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080830.html
You can scroll just like you’re standing up there and turning 360 degrees. I look at that and at least partly understand why people climb Mt. Everest.
They were climbing on oxygen. The balance of the evidence (see “The Ghosts of Everest”) indicates that they fell while descending, but Odell last observed then ascending. The forensic evidence suggests that Mallory fell late in the day since he was not wearing his sunglasses. This would have been a long time after the storm observed by Odell. What I know about the 1924 tragedy, and I have been extremely interested in this episode of mountaineering history since I was a kid, makes me doubt the pressure drop theory. I have no doubt that bad weather contributed, it almost always does, but the specific mechanism seems fishy to me.
As far as Scott goes, it most certainly was extreme weather. But this was combined with a number of bad decisions, specifically taking an extra man on the final push to the pole, which may have compounded the effect of the bad weather (see “The Worst Journey in the World”, which BTW is one of the greatest expedition books ever written).
Ask Napoleon about climate change in 1812. 500,000 of his troops were lost during the disasterous retreat from Moscow.
Don Mattox: August 2, 2010 at 1:42 pm
About 55 years ago I was a meteorologist at Eglin AFB when what I will all a “pressure front” came through. The wind increased from about 5 mph to 45 mph and back down in a space of about a minute. I had to do a lot of “explaining” how this could happen on a cloudless day with no warning on the synoptic charts.
Those same conditions over here cause a haboob — a wall of sand and dust up to 2,000 feet high slamming through the area with absolutely no warning except seeing it coming. If Eglin was surrounded by desert instead of scrub pines, you’d have seen this —
http://limetap.com/images/jun06/Iraq_haboob.jpg
The beasts aren’t associated with frontal movement, either.
Extreme weather causing deaths on Mount Everest? Nooooo it couldn’t be!!!
Note the sarcasm; the weather kills people all the time in the Himalayas
You are all wrong; Darwin took them.
DUH.
extreme is normal in the mountains.
It’s interesting conjecture, as is much about this great mystery, but of absolutely no consequence to AGW or climate change.
While no-one seems to be overtly suggesting that it might be , its very appearance here does seem somewhat inferential, so while it’s an interesting distraction it does nothing to restore the sanity to questions of around climate change.
When pushing the limits at the edge of existence it doesn’t take much, weather, exhaustion, distraction, mistake or just bad luck to make the difference. Storms happen regularly on high mountains and it wouldn’t need any more weather than is usual in such places.
How Mallory died is unknowable, though some plausible theories can be spun now that his body is found.
Mallory was a physical freak, with endurance and strength that is extremely rare. He was also an outstanding mountaineer of high intelligence and great determination. He had a capacity to endure suffering. At 38 he knew that he was on his last try to summit Everest.
It is a wonderful thing that his body was recovered. It will help preserve the memory of him, which merits highest respect.
“As far as Scott goes, it most certainly was extreme weather. But this was combined with a number of bad decisions, specifically taking an extra man on the final push to the pole.”
Scott did face adverse weather, but so did Amundsen. It is a documented fact that the weather did not delay the Norwegians as much as Scott who lost several days waiting for an improvement. This said, the weather was a factor but not the most important one in deciding the fate of the Polar Party.
Returning to the original topic – did Mallory reach the summit? The head says nobody will ever know for certain until hard evidence is found; the heart says of course he did.