Avalanche on Mt Everest

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-Q-
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Avalanche on Mt Everest

Post by -Q- » April 18th, 2014, 9:11 am


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Roy
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Re: Avalanche on Mt Everest

Post by Roy » April 18th, 2014, 4:02 pm

Seems all local Sherpas doing all the work for people paying fifty grand and have them haul tons of oxygen tanks up there so they summit just does not sit well with me?
The downhill of the mind is harder than the uphill of the body. - Yuichiro Miura

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kepPNW
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Re: Avalanche on Mt Everest

Post by kepPNW » April 22nd, 2014, 2:01 pm

Mount Everest's Sherpas Shut Down the Rest of This Year's Climbing Season - The Wire
http://www.thewire.com/global/2014/04/m ... od/361025/
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Bosterson
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Re: Avalanche on Mt Everest

Post by Bosterson » April 22nd, 2014, 2:22 pm

I read an AFP article about this in the Guardian this morning. The reportage has overall been pretty poor - they keep referring to it as an "avalanche," when it was actually part of a serac collapsing - the same serac, actually, that caused Russell Brice to cancel his whole guiding season in 2012 because he thought it was too dangerous. The AFP also kept referring to it as the Sherpas "abandoning" the climbing season, rather than discussing it as the result of the safety and compensation issues at play between the Sherpas and the Nepalese government. And they kept discussing how badly this would inconvenience poor western "climbers" who'd paid tens of thousands of dollars to be escorted up the mountain.

Jon Krakauer has a good analysis over at the New Yorker. On the topic of whether Everest is actually safer (while the Sherpa mortality rate is very high, the rate for western "climbers" has dropped in the past two decades), he actually raises a very good point:
Jon Krakauer wrote:The statistics suggesting that Everest has become safe for members may, in fact, be giving Westerners a false sense of security, however. The astounding number of climbers who now attempt to reach the summit on the limited number of days when the weather is favorable presents a new kind of hazard. A notorious photo shot by Ralf Dujmovits in May, 2012, showed more than a hundred and fifty people attached to a series of fixed ropes as they ascended the Lhotse Face toward the South Col of Everest, jammed together so tightly that they had to move in lockstep. The static weight of all these people and their gear was well over thirty thousand pounds. If some mishap had occurred that caused more than a handful of the climbers to put their full weight on one of the ropes simultaneously, the shock to the anchors securing the ropes to the ice could easily have caused them to fail, resulting in the climbers falling two thousand or more feet to the base of the Lhotse Face. If such an accident should come to pass in the future (which isn’t far-fetched), the death count for both members and sherpas would be horrific.

I hope in addition to better workers' rights for Sherpas, this heralds the end of mass guiding on Everest.
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Re: Avalanche on Mt Everest

Post by mcds » April 23rd, 2014, 1:17 am

Thanks for the New Yorker link, Bosterson. Even Krakauer is calling it an avalanche.

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Re: Avalanche on Mt Everest

Post by RobinB » April 24th, 2014, 2:20 pm

There's a really good personal account of the tragedy, by someone in the Sherpa community, here:
I picture next year, at gatherings around Khumbu, when the women sit with the women and the men sit with the men, when the children dart about and pull faces at each other from behind their parent’s backs, and the cups of tea are poured and served first to the patriarchs, then to the householders, down the young fathers and husbands. In each line there will be gaps, like missing teeth – if remaining teeth could all shuffle forward, the way that the adolescents, now a little less awkward than last year, will move a little closer to the fire to fill the spaces of the ones that are missing.

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Re: Avalanche on Mt Everest

Post by Bosterson » April 29th, 2014, 10:23 am

Two issues that come up with respect to this year's tragedy: the role of climate change on destabilizing the mountains, and the thorny interplay between exploitation and reducing poverty woven into the employment of Sherpas.
The Atlantic wrote:A few years ago, ClimateWire interviewed a Sherpa who had participated in Sir Edmund Hillary's historic expedition and, upon returning to Base Camp in 2011, was shocked by how much had changed since 1953. He predicted the end of snow on Everest within the next few decades.

"It's going to be no more snow, only rock," he told a reporter. However, he also said that the livelihood of his community was of primary concern, and that keeping climbers away was not an option: "If we stop the tourists to save the mountains, we don't have anything to do. Just grow potatoes and eat and sit."
(My emphasis added.)
mcds wrote:Even Krakauer is calling it an avalanche.
You're right - he referred to it as a being an ice wall, and then referred to it as an avalanche for the rest of the article. I guess this is easiest for the lay audience, who again does not know (or probably care) what a serac is. The Atlantic article above describes it thus:
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.
I think this is somewhat of an important distinction with respect to the role of climate change in making mountains more dangerous. The big catastrophe on K2 in 2008 was also due to a large piece of an enormous ice headwall cleaving off, killing climbers and severing fixed ropes. There were other factors at play then, as now, but you clearly climate change is becoming a crucial issue in mountaineering these days.
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Roy
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Re: Avalanche on Mt Everest

Post by Roy » April 30th, 2014, 12:39 am

Bosterson wrote:
The Atlantic wrote:A few years ago, ClimateWire interviewed a Sherpa who had participated in Sir Edmund Hillary's historic expedition and, upon returning to Base Camp in 2011, was shocked by how much had changed since 1953. He predicted the end of snow on Everest within the next few decades.

"It's going to be no more snow, only rock," he told a reporter. However, he also said that the livelihood of his community was of primary concern, and that keeping climbers away was not an option: "If we stop the tourists to save the mountains, we don't have anything to do. Just grow potatoes and eat and sit."
1999 was a very low snow year and a expedition set out and found the famous British climber George Mallorys body. 75 years after he was last seen above 28,000 ft going for the summit in 1924.

http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9905/0 ... s=PM:WORLD

The very large Japanese 1970 expedition lost six Sherpas in the Kumbu ice fall in a similar situation as this year. And one more died on the same trip.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2012/0 ... 2C4caIYLZ4 .

So in 45 years not much has changed. Other than the shear numbers now allowed on the mountain.
The downhill of the mind is harder than the uphill of the body. - Yuichiro Miura

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