Global Courant 2023-05-20 15:55:00
KATHMANDU — Mount Everest is losing snow and becoming “dry and rocky,” British climber Kenton Cool, who this week made his 17th ascent of the world’s highest peak, the most by a foreigner, said Saturday.
Mr Cool, 49, who first climbed the 8,849-meter summit in 2004, said the mammoth mountain now appears to be drying up.
“If you go back to the early 2000s, there used to be a lot of snow,” he told Reuters in an interview in Kathmandu after returning from his record-breaking expedition that was confirmed this week by Nepalese and hiking officials.
“A general trend of the mountain is to be more rocky and less snow… But it changes from year to year.”
Mr. Cool said he had never seen the kind of rock outcrops he saw on the Lhotse Face, along the route to the summit of Everest.
“That shows how dry the mountain is now… I think it’s because of the lack of precipitation, a lack of snowfall. It could be global warming or some kind of environmental change,” he said.
Climate scientists say global temperatures have risen by an average of 0.74°C over the past 100 years, but the warming in the Himalayas is greater than global averages.
Officials have said Nepal’s average temperature is rising by 0.06°C annually, in part due to its location between China and India, two of the world’s biggest polluters.
Also this week, a 53-year-old Nepalese guide, Mr. Kami Rita Sherpa, broke his own record of most summits after climbing Everest for the 27th time.
According to Mount, Britain’s record climber
Asia Region News ,Next Big Thing in Public Knowledg
