Might it be that climate change will rip our egocentric peaks out from under us? Might we learn humility in the face of Nature? Gratitude for her strong teachings?
And see this.
The Year Climate Change Closed Everest
As the world heats up, the Himalayas are becoming more volatile.
April 28, 2014
by Svati Kirsten Narulaapr
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.
Climbers had warily eyed the serac that collapsed on April 18 for years. In fact, a major expedition outfitter canceled its climbing season in 2012 because of it—a decision vividly reconstructed by Jon Krakauer in The New Yorker last week:
0 thoughts on “Climate Change Chronicles, Everest: “Every day we sit and listen to the groaning and clashing of the glacier””
As I mentioned in a fb post…it has taken over 4 billion yrs for the earth to come into balance with itself…and it is an ongoing dynamic…dam building…pollutants in the air…
depleting fresh water deposits…ozone destruction. ..and no many other man – made factors are contributing to the earth’s imbalance. ..