S6E1: What happens if Mount Everest loses all of its snow and ice?
No place on earth can escape the effects of climate change, not even Mount Everest. The highest glacier on the world’s tallest mountain — the South Col Glacier — is rapidly disappearing. A new University of Maine-led study found that the glacier is losing several decades of ice and snow accumulation annually due to human-induced climate change.
These findings are the latest from the 2019 National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition, led by UMaine Climate Change Institute director Paul Mayewski. In this episode of “The Maine Question,” Mayewski and UMaine Ph.D. candidate Mariusz Potocki, both co-authors of the new study, elaborate on the findings and their implications for mountaineering and the glacier stored water on which more than 1 billion people depend to provide melt for drinking water and irrigation. They also describe what it takes to conduct research on the rooftop of the world.
Transcript
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Paul Mayewski: People who go to climb Mt. Everest in the coming decades will not be climbing through snow, during the climbing season, at least. They’ll be climbing either ice, and as the decades go on, they’ll be climbing on a rock instead.
Ron Lisnet: That’s Paul Mayewski, Director of U Maine’s Climate Change Institute, talking about what he and his team of scientists have discovered about what’s happening on the world’s highest mountain. I’m Ron Lisnet, and this is “The Maine Question Podcast.”
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Ron: Thanks for joining us as we begin season six. We’ve got some compelling stories lined up for this season, though not many will have bigger headline grabbing findings than this story. Mt. Everest, it rises 29,029 feet above sea level. That’s almost five and a half miles.
Many of us probably assume that the world’s highest peak would be an impenetrable fortress of frozen ice and snow. Mayewski and several of his fellow researchers from the Climate Change Institute were part of a large group of scientists from several institutions who went to the Himalayas to take measure of the changes happening on the rooftop of the world.
The field research was part of the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition in 2019. Instead of a frozen fortress that is unaffected by changes happening at lower elevations, they found that climate change has had a significant impact on the world’s highest glacier. The ice and snow up to 8,000 meters has disappeared at an alarming rate.
Thousands of years of accumulation have vanished in about 30 years. Beyond the drastic changes that will mean for climbers who want to conquer Everest, these rapid changes will have a profound effect on millions of people. In fact, more than 1 billion people depend on these glaciers for drinking water and irrigation.
We spoke with Mayewski and his PhD student, Mariusz Potocki, who did the work to retrieve the world’s highest ice core. That tube of ice, more than 30 feet long, was brought off the mountain and analyzed to provide these findings. Potocki also helped set up the world’s two highest weather stations near the summit. They’ll provide climbers and others with much more detailed accurate information.
Mayewski and Potocki talked with us about their findings and its many implications. They also shared with us what the adventure was like, and what the challenges were to doing science in this extreme environment.
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Ron: Well, thank you both for joining us. Maybe let’s go back to when this all began. This expedition, I believe, took place in 2019. How did it come together? What was the overall goal and the overall mission of this huge effort here? Paul, maybe I’ll start with you.
Paul: My involvement in this expedition, the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Mount Everest expedition, started in 2018, when I was approached by National Geographic with the idea that they wanted to go to Everest and do some research there.
I spoke to them. Then, a few days later, I basically got a request from them to be the science leader. After that, I got a request to be the expedition leader. National Geographic chose Everest for the same reason that we did.
Many years ago, we mostly worked on the north side. It’s iconic. As a consequence, people know exactly where it is. People get excited about what might be happening on Mount Everest. Mount Everest, of course, is the highest mountain in the world.
The big question, really, was, for the expedition, how much of a change has occurred as a consequence of recent human activities on Mount Everest. Mount Everest is one of a whole series of mountains throughout the Himalayas and the so‑called Hindu Kush.
The water that is precipitated onto those mountains as snow, which eventually forms ice, is a storage or a so‑called water tower for what turned out to be 250 million people on the planet. If you take a look at all of the water towers, all of the mountains in the world that have glacier cover, they impact, in terms of their water resources, about two billion people.
Understanding what’s happening with glaciers, water availability, and water quality is very important.
Ron: Mario, what was your part of this project? What were you there to do?
Mariusz Potocki: First of all, when Paul first contacted me about the Everest expedition, I thought honestly it’s joke. It’s a dream to go a place like this. At the beginning, I didn’t know I will have a chance to be in a summit team.
The plan evolved couple of times different direction. Since I know I will be at the summit team, that just caused a huge excitement. My major role as a glaciologist being collect samples all the way up and drill ice cores at the highest possible location at Everest.
Our major goal was summit. We had to verify our plans during the expedition. Especially with weather patterns out here. Weather was very peaky. The weather windows, they were not very long. We had to change our plans.
Since a huge number of climbers try to summit same day as we plan our drilling process, we had to verify this. We recovered ice core at the South Col glacier, which is, I think, the best drill site on Everest. It’s the highest located glacier on the mountain. Wonderful scenery. Very comfortable drilling conditions, compared to what we may have at the summit.
Ron: What is the headline from the latest findings you have? How different are those findings from what was thought to be happening?
Paul: The big headline from our Everest expedition is the fact that even the highest glacier on Earth, it’s just over 8,000 meters, turns out to be declining, disappearing quite rapidly since probably the 1990s as a consequence of climate change.
The upper 2,000 years of that glacier are gone since sometime in the 1990s to the present, a dramatic volume loss of that glacier, which means that although unidentified in the past, that glaciers at high elevations throughout the world are as impacted by warming as are the glaciers that we see at middle and lower elevations.
The final take‑home measure is we know the Arctic is warming. We know portions of the Antarctic warming. We know that things are changing all over the planet. The ocean is warming. Now, we know that the highest elevation on the planet is warming
Ron: Mario, how different or concerning is what you found versus what was thought to be happening there. Is there a big difference in those two things?
Mariusz: Yeah. We are expecting that we’ll find that, first of all, we’ll see changes in glaciers. We didn’t expect that what we find, that high‑altitude glaciers, especially at the 8,000 meters, they’re disappearing so fast.
The biggest surprise for us was that surface of glacier at 8,000 meter at the South Col, it’s already 2,000 years old. The top part of the glacier is gone. That was the biggest surprise for us. We didn’t expect that. We thought it could be couple of decades, maybe century, but not 2,000 years. That based on radiocarbon dating,
Ron: Are we going to potentially get to a point when there’s actually either no snow but ice, and even bare ground at these high elevations? Is that where we’re headed?
Paul: It’s very possible that in the next two to five decades, that the glacier that we looked at, just over 8,000 meters on Everest, will be gone completely. It has been self‑protected for a long time with snow cover. Snow, when it falls on glaciers, reflects a large amount of the incoming radiation, 90 to 100 percent.
Once that snow cover is gone, you expose ice, which is darker than snow. It absorbs radiation, doesn’t reflect as much. Then, eventually, when the ice is lost, you have rock, which absorbs a great deal of radiation. That’s what’s happened.
It still snows on Everest, but the snow disappears during the summer season. There is just not enough thickness of snow to protect the surface ice. The ice is exposed. It goes much faster than it would have had it had snow cover.
The net result is that people who go to climb Mount Everest in the coming decades will not be climbing through snow, during the climbing season at least. They’ll be climbing on bare ice. As the decades go on, they’ll be climbing on a rock instead.
Ron: Play this out for us, in terms of potential outcomes that might happen. If the water dries up, people don’t have that resource to drink, for irrigation, or for power. Are there other ramifications, in terms of instability, earthquakes, or other things that might happen as well?
Paul: As the glaciers in these mountainous regions begin to disappear, which of course, has been going on since at least the 1990s, and quite dramatically in the last couple of decades, we, of course, lose water for hydroelectric power, water for agriculture, water for human and ecosystem consumption at the same time, this tremendous amount of melting that’s going on.
This melting can get trapped along the glacier edge in literally an ice container for some period of time. Eventually, that ice container breaks because the glacier is getting smaller and smaller. It can release catastrophic amounts of water. These are called glacier outburst floods, GLOFs. They can wipe out entire villages.
In addition, as you get more and more melt, the very steep, in many cases, debris‑covered slopes in Himalayas become less stable because water is running over them. Temperature is warmer in general. Anything that was frozen now moves around.
Plants will begin to invade to higher elevations, animals to higher elevations. Some of the ones who live at the very high elevations will obviously disappear. It’s a very big change for the people in these high mountain areas.
As we know, the Arctic is changing dramatically. In fact, as of 2007 to 2012, the length of the summer season on the Arctic doubled. Everything changed. The sea ice extent is radically different than it has been for thousands of years. That result is opening up possibility for shifting, possibility for more migration.
At the same time, anywhere there’s frozen ground, as there would be in very high parts of the Himalayas ‑‑ in this case, the Arctic ‑‑ wherever there’s frozen ground that’s melting, all of a sudden, it becomes almost impossible to move over that.
The Arctic is a good example of what will probably happen in Hindu Kush, Himalaya, a very dramatic change, not just in the temperature in the area but in their entire environment.
Mariusz: Paul already pointed these old changes. It may affect old people living down from the mountains. Based on our experience, we see that changes in high mountains. We’ve observed that in Chilean Andes, but we see right now this in Himalayas. Huge amount of people living down there, very strong related to water sources.
Himalayas provide this water. It’s for agriculture, hydropower, and for ecosystems and human living. Small changes up in the mountains affect people down the stream.
Ron: This is happening in mountain ranges all over the world, right? The Peruvian Andes, I saw something recently where their water resource from glaciers is going to go away as well.
Paul: Absolutely. All high mountain areas are having the same sort of impacts. The places like the Andes ‑‑ we work in Peru right now, but we worked in Chile for many years ‑‑ these glaciers are being depleted very, very fast. In Chile, the glaciers are considered to be such an important resource that you can’t take a piece of ice. It’s against the law unless you have a permit.
Chile is a very long country, a very narrow country. It is completely dependent on the long string of glaciers on the Andes that provide hydropower, water for all of the important uses that we use water. As these glaciers get smaller and smaller, the hydropower plants that we put in will begin to decrease in value.
The pasturelands that people have been using for animals will begin to disappear. When we worked in Chile, we worked with the local cowboys and their horses for our logistics. They tell us that in the past, there could’ve been X number of cattle grazing on an acre. Now it’s probably 20 percent of that number of cattle can be sustained on an acre, very dramatic changes.
In Bolivia, for example, there is a place called Chacaltaya. It was a tremendous ski area. It was a snow‑covered glacier. They built chairlifts. Now the glacier is completely gone. It still snows, but it’s not enough snow to fill in all the rocks that were covered by the glacier before.
It’s a chairlift basically to nowhere, up and down a hill with no longer any ability to ski there. The ski lodge is a tourist destination, but it’s not for skiing anymore.
Ron: Mariusz, talk about the logistics of this. It was at least 28,000 feet where you pulled the highest ice core. Just talk about the adventure, the logistics of getting all this equipment up there and doing what you need to do when there’s no oxygen and you can’t take your gloves off for very long. How hard was it to get the samples that you got?
Mariusz: First of all, I focus so much to prepare myself physically because that’s very challenging, climbing Everest. As a goal to drill at the summit, I really put a lot of work to prepare myself physically, just my ability, just to climb so high. Plus I had a lot of stress that if I’d be able to do any work at that elevation.
That was very long process, lots of people had been involved in this, lots of logistic behind, lots of preparation, not just myself but also the gear that I was planning to use and drilling equipment. We did lots of testing here in our laboratories and in the field as well.
We traveled to Iceland. We had to modify our offshore drill, lots of preparation, and then lots of unknowns because nobody drilled at that altitude before. One of the biggest fears which we had was that gear will work at that elevation, and how long we’ll be able to stay and proceed our work.
Everything worked fine. Since I start drilling, I realized that ice condition is great, and it may happen. We succeed.
Ron: You must have breathed a sigh of relief. How long was the ice core that you pulled?
Mariusz: When we arrived at the drill site, we had a full dedicated [inaudible 16:56] . We didn’t know what to expect. It could be a very slow process. It’s very tiring given the low elevations to pulling out the drill with a core. Since you go deeper and deeper, it’s more difficult. Our process took us about three hours. We were very surprised how fast it went.
We recovered 10 meters at the major drill site. Later, we had extra time, so we decide to collect basal ice from other site closer to South Col camp. Total, we recovered 12 meters of ice.
Ron: You’ve been to many of these far‑flung places all across the globe for this particular expedition. I suppose you were the logistics manager. Talk about the logistics and the adventure that the team experienced. You’re at base camp on Everest, right?
Paul: Yeah. Because we had 35 scientists involved in this project, part of my duty was to know what was going on at base camp, scientifically, what was going on at lower elevations, scientifically, and then, of course, our important summit team, of which Mariusz Potocki and a colleague, Baker Perry from Appalachian State, and Tom Matthews from Loughborough University previously, but now at King’s College in London.
They were the three scientists on the summit team, along with a large group of Sherpas. There was a lot of science going on. We were looking at, not just water quality from melting glaciers. We were also looking at overall glacier health, trying to understand how much it has changed in the last few hundred, if not few thousand years.
There was a University of Maine team that was involved in the project with us. Aaron Putnam was the leader of the Glacial Geology Program. We had people drilling in lakes to look at lake cores.
We had people putting in automatic weather stations, five of them. Two of the highest are now the highest in the world. Those were particularly exciting because that is the first time that those stations have ever been put up there.
There was a high one, not quite as high as these two, in the past, but it only lasted six months. Ours have already lasted a couple of years. They require some repair, but they’re doing basically quite well.
It is going to provide much better information for climbers in the future. Climbers have a very short window. Typically, the last two weeks of May is when the primary climbing season is on the south side of Everest.
Within that two weeks, what you hope for is a three day window in which you can make your way to the top and come back down again. In order for that three‑day‑window to be optimal conditions, you need low winds. You need a slight increase in pressure. Based on the atmospheric circulation patterns, the increase in pressure gives you a tiny bit more oxygen. Then you need, obviously, milder temperatures and, as I mentioned, low winds.
That was all based on models before. The important thing is how good are those models? As it turns out, the models, actually not so bad, but we didn’t know that, number one. Number two, they are not absolutely the same as what is happening real‑time up on top of the mountain.
In order to be able to put high elevation information into global and regional models to understand how precipitation, temperature changes, and how it affects weather patterns, it’s very valuable to have these automatic weather stations up there.
I should also mention there was a biology team, there was a surveying team. The most detailed map ever produced of the south side of Mount Everest by National Geographic team, Alex Tate and others. There was a lot going on. It was an exciting place to be.
Ron: Now, we often hear the metaphor used, in terms of the Earth’s climate and what’s happening, that it’s like trying to stop an ocean liner. It doesn’t happen on a dime. How inevitable are the trends that are happening? Is it now a matter of just adapting and mitigating what is going to happen no matter what?
Paul: The likelihood is that things will just continue the way they are. If we want to make sure that in the coming decades, it doesn’t get as bad as it can, we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Right now, it certainly looks as if at least the moderate to the bad trend is the one that we’re headed towards.
If we were to cut back greenhouse gas emissions today back to about 20 years ago, we might around 2040 or 2050, start to see everything flattened out a little bit. It’s unlikely that that’s going to happen, unfortunately, despite a tremendous amount of effort on the part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, scientists, and people all over the world.
The answer is that we’re going to experience more of the same. The best word to describe future climate is less stable. In some places, that means much warmer, others, actually colder. In some places, it means wetter, drier, increased storms, increased sea level rise. We’re on track for some rougher times than we have now.
That means that we need to take mitigation more seriously. It means that we have to adapt. Like everything else, there’s a silver lining. If we decrease greenhouse gases, we can slow the process of warming down. If we decrease greenhouse gases, we decrease change in temperature, and therefore, migration of invasive species, increases in diseases.
If we reduce greenhouse gases, we also clean up the atmosphere with respect to a whole variety of pollutants. Everything from particles, which affect our respiratory system, to toxic metals, which affect us neurologically, and also, our cardiology, and a variety of other things. This is the time.
We’re reminded by COVID‑19, because the air cleaned up quite a bit during COVID‑19. We’re reminded that we have the opportunity to live in a much cleaner and a much healthier environment, despite the fact that the length of the summer seasons will increase and the winters will get milder.
It will be an experience very different than anything experienced by any of our family members going back tens, hundreds of generations.
Ron: Did anything come out of the recent climate change summit in Glasgow, Scotland?
Paul: The results were largely predicated by what comes out of the every four to six‑year Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change UN‑hosted reports. Those reports have stressed every single time they come out, and this means for more than 20 years, that we are experiencing warming. It’s a consequence of greenhouse gas rise. That rise is a consequence of human activity.
The Paris Climate Accord was one of the most successful of the policy meetings that went on. Because for the first time ever, countries were expected to come to the table with their estimate of how they felt they could reduce their emissions rather than being pushed into it, which obviously, always seems to work out much better.
The US, of course, dropped out of the Paris Climate Accord. That gave the entire Paris Climate Accord and the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Initiative quite a kick in the wrong direction. As a consequence, however, grassroots organizations, certainly throughout the United States, became even more active.
The hope was that COP26 in Glasgow would not only reinforce the Paris Climate Accord, which it did, but would also strengthen a variety of things, including getting countries to reduce their emissions even more. It’s now been several more years. Therefore, the drop has to be even greater.
By getting countries together to help those countries that are not creating the problem that tend to be poorer some kind of support. The answer is that COP26 went in that direction. Did it do as much as people hoped that it would? No, not quite. US stepped in and had, I think, a very positive effect at re‑rallying countries.
You can’t just expect the world to change in a couple or a few days with COP26. It was a good step in the right direction. There’s tons more to do. It’s critical that we keep our eye on this. There’s been a lot of interest in climate change in the last couple of years. It’s taken decades for the level of interest to rise where it is today, which is fantastic.
Let’s just hope, however, that it doesn’t turn out to be something that people get excited about for a couple of years and then forget about. This is a long, long‑term involvement that we have to have with cleaning up our environment, reducing greenhouse gases, and learning to live with our environment better.
For the US, it’s a great opportunity to retune our infrastructure. After World War II, the US had, without a doubt, the most impressive infrastructure in the world for energy, transport, travel. It’s old. There are better ways of doing things now. This is the perfect time for us to make the transition to renewables.
Will that transition occur within five years? No. It’s going to take 25 to 40 years for the full transition. In the process, there’ll be plenty of time for all of us to adjust. We’re already beginning to adjust to the idea that there’ll be a lot of electric cars out there. Three years ago, I don’t think anybody believed that that would necessarily be the case.
I’m very positive about the future. There are places that you won’t want to live. Maine is a place you will want to live. For better or for worse, the population will increase.
There will be countries in which there’ll be hundreds, millions of people migrating because of drought, because of food insecurity, and a variety of other things. In general, the US is in good shape. I think we have to remember that we are part of a global community. If we let the rest of the global community fall, it’s going to impact us.
There’s a lot to do, but I’m optimistic. Particularly optimistic as of the last couple of years.
Ron: Finally, where does this go from here? Mario, what’s next in terms of expeditions or things to explore that develops this story further for you?
Mariusz: We learned so much from Everest expedition. Of course, we’d like to continue. We have lots of limitation, just even financial. Expedition like this costs a lot of money. There are lots of places in Himalayas we’d like to sample. We’d like to prove what do we learn on Everest. Definitely, we’ll try to focus on that area in the future.
Ron: What are some expeditions coming up that continues this search?
Paul: There are many more things that we need to learn about the climate before we are shocked by another surprise. We’ve had a lot of surprises in the past. Acid rain, which of course, legislation did a great job in reducing. We have a lot of other shocks. Latest is PFAS, forever chemicals. Toxic metals like lead. Of course, greenhouse gas rise.
I don’t think most people believe that it could have an impact this fast. When I say fast, I mean faster than a political cycle within a very short period of time. Our research continues to look at past climate. There are things that we can learn about past climate that are not captured in approximately 100 years of instrumental records.
We also look at modern climate, basically, from today, back 100 years, to understand as much as we can about how the system operates, how fast it’s changed, because that’s the best data. All of this is intended to help us make, through our institute, and obviously, many other organizations, better predictions for future climate, where it will go, and what the impacts will be.
All the models suggest that by 2100, we will have 1.5 to 3, possibly, if not 4 to 4∞C global rise in temperature, which is very significant. They’re all quite linear. They’re all ramping up. The final number might be very close to what the real number is.
In the past, the models have always gotten the basic trend, but they’ve always underestimated what’s going to happen. However, we need more information. We need to know what’s going to happen in the next 10 to 20 years.
That requires understanding what happens locally, not just to precipitation, temperature, and winds, but also, what those impacts can be, how fast they can change, and how fast they might go backwards for a little while.
For example, if we had a volcanic event, like the 1992 Pinatubo volcanic event, we would probably experience, in northern hemisphere, a decrease in temperature of one to two degrees Centigrade for a year or two. Because the Arctic responds two times more than anything else. That means a two to four‑degree Centigrade drop in temperature.
If all of a sudden, shipping opens up throughout the Arctic, and everybody gets used to the idea that they need to ship through the Arctic, and everything gets set up, a volcanic event could shut that down for a year or two. Not the end of the world, necessarily. When you start talking about agriculture, it is very important.
Agriculture can only take bad hits for so long. One or two years of bad weather conditions for agriculture and there’ll be a lot of failure and food insecurity.
Mariusz: This is very important. What Paul mentioned, especially places like Southern Greenland, which is developing very fast. It’s been attractive as a touristic place, but also, establishing these water quality and monitoring just before that happened.
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Mariusz: This is very important. We see trends lots of places change. Right now, Southern Greenland is attractive as well as a mining place. There are lots of fears that it may change entire ecology there.
Ron: Fascinating and eye‑opening work. Thanks for taking the time to tell us about it.
Mariusz: Thank you.
Paul: Thank you, Ron.
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Ron: Thanks for joining us as we embark on season six of “The Maine Question” podcast. You can find all of our episodes on many of the platforms where you get all your podcasts, Apple and Google podcasts Spotify, Stitcher, and SoundCloud. They can also be found on UMaine’s Facebook and YouTube pages, as well as Amazon podcasts and Audible.
Drop us a note if you have a question or a comment at mainequestion@maine.edu. This is Ron Lisnet. We’ll catch you next time on The Maine Question.
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