Duncan Quincy (5:04)

We see more rock falls, we see more avalanches, and we see previously stable glaciers starting to disintegrate.

Emily Gracie (5:12)

His team has been studying the Khumbu Glacier near Everest for years and will be heading on an expedition there this spring.

Duncan Quincy (5:19)

I think there's a lot of secrets that are wrapped up within these glaciers that have been around a long time.

Emily Gracie (5:24)

As the planet continues to heat up, more and more secrets are likely to be discovered. With each new melt, more and more mysteries reveal themselves as layers of ice peel back and the dead emerge from their icy tombs. And somewhere up there, perhaps preserved in the ice, a small camera waits to be discovered. Holding images that could rewrite the history books of who truly conquered Everest first. Duncan Quincy, thanks so much for joining me today to talk about this very interesting topic. I know you have some big research coming up here in the next year. I want to hear all about that as well. Can you give me a little brief background background though on your area of expertise?

Duncan Quincy (6:10)

Yeah, sure. So I'm a glaciologist. I work at the University of Leeds in the UK and I'm mostly interested in how high mountain areas of the world are responding to climate change. I'm specifically interested in how the glaciers are evolving, how long they're likely to be around as a water resource for the people who live downstream and depend on them, and really interested in the very high elevation processes that occur within the snow and ice, you know, at around 6,000, 7,000 meters above sea level. Hmm.

Emily Gracie (6:46)

Okay. Well, that all pinpoints what we're going to talk about today. We're talking about Mount Everest and I spoke to somebody who did an expedition this past year and he didn't go all the way to the summit, but he did go to base camp and he talked a lot. I work with him, I, he talked a lot about the things he saw and what surprised him. Um, can you give me a little brief overview though, for some people who have no idea anything about Mount Everest? Some basics here, how tall it is, what the climate's like, what we're looking at here as far as extremes?

Duncan Quincy (7:16)

Yeah, sure. Um, so the altitude of Mount Everest is 8,848 meters above sea level. A base camp where your colleague has been to. Then you're talking around 5,300 meters above sea level. If you're looking up at the peaks, then you tend to be looking at nice clean ice, you know, snowy mountains, looks absolutely beautiful within the valleys. Then you've got these glaciers which cut down and they've eroded their way through the landscape, so they sit very much in the valley bottoms. The ice might be 100, 200, even 300 meters thick in places. And on top of that ice then you tend to have a lot of debris cover which is well, effectively fallen off the mountain sides as the glaciers cut its way through. So it's fed onto the glacier surface by rock avalanche. And therefore you're looking at quite a dirty kind of rubble fed landscape. It's not necessarily the beautiful clean ice landscape that you might associate with some other regions of the world. For example, it's a very hostile environment when you're up there. Temperatures at night, even in the Even in the pre monsoon season when most people are visiting that area, they might dip to about minus 10 degrees, minus 10 degrees Celsius. That is of course below, below zero. So yeah, pretty cold at night. But then during the day you can have really cloud free weather which makes it very pleasant to be there at that time of year. If you're there in the monsoon then as the name suggests, it's really very heavy rainfall for large parts of the, of the daytime and, and that's in the period, let's say June through to September and then through November into March. That's your winter time. So that's when it's getting extremely cold and you probably don't want to be there in that time of year. There's some people stay there to monitor weather stations and that sort of thing. But, but largely at that sort of elevation it's, it's free of people around that winter period.

Emily Gracie (9:20)

So when people are trying to reach the summit there's actually a really small window of time. Right where it's safe.

Duncan Quincy (9:26)

Absolutely, yeah. So there's two main weather windows, one just before the monsoon comes in and once after the, after the monsoon has departed. So I think the slightly larger season, longer season, more reliable season is the pre monsoon. So that's around May time. That's when most people, but most people will be making their way up there around April, climbing into May, that sort of time and then again in November into early December. You might expect some more summers then and then during those periods, I mean you're really looking for a period where this prediction of quite stable weather for a good few days so the people who are camped high can make that final push up to the very top. But it is actually a quite a short weather window which is why then you see these pictures more so recently of these long queues for people trying to, trying to reach the, trying to reach the peak.

Emily Gracie (10:20)

Yeah, it's a little deceiving. It makes you think that there's just constantly people out there. So I know that people started attempting to reach the summit like a hundred years ago. So back in like the 1920s. I'm curious how the weather and climate has changed since then. Have you, what's your knowledge on the changing climate over the past 100 years when people have been attempting this?

Duncan Quincy (10:44)

Yeah, sure. I mean I think we know now quite with quite some certainty that the last 100 years have been the warmest and the fastest warming for the last 2000 years. So we are in a period of a very fast warming and we're currently seeing a temperature rise of about a third of a degree every decade. For the last four decades, it's been something of that sort of order. The rain, on the other hand, or the precipitation, mostly snow, actually, at that elevation that's been largely stable for the last four decades. So we are seeing quite a rapid rise in temperatures, which is forecast, of course, to go on into, into future decades. Precipitation is a little bit more difficult to predict, but has been largely stable. But the overall impact then is that we're seeing quite a lot of glacier ice loss in this region at accelerating rates as well as you would expect to be hand in hand with the accelerating temperature increases.

Emily Gracie (11:41)

Yeah, I think the initial reaction, people would be like, okay, so warmer weather, easier to climb Everest, Is it the opposite, though? Are conditions actually getting much worse and more dangerous?

Duncan Quincy (11:51)

Yeah, in many ways it does make it a lot more dangerous. I mean, for a start, the weather is much more unpredictable. And of course, I don't need to tell you, but we're seeing more extremes all of the time, less predictability. So those weather windows that we're talking about, it becomes very difficult for people to be able to, to predict them and to be able to rely on them. So there's the unpredictability element. But also, as you warm these mountain environments, then you increase the instabilities. So with a frozen landscape, the ice is effectively gluing everything together. As soon as you warm that up and you introduce a layer of water in there, then things become a lot more unstable. So we see more rock falls, we see more avalanches, and we see previously stable glaciers starting to disintegrate. And that trek through the icefall, for example, where there's huge surrats, there's huge blocks of ice which you could say poised to fall. We can expect to see that happening a lot more regularly as that environment warms up. For sure.

Emily Gracie (12:58)

How do you get weather observations on Mount Everest? Is it people's notes? Like, it's got to be such an inhospitable environment, it's got to be hard to measure anything up there?

Duncan Quincy (13:08)

It's pretty hard, yeah. But thanks to the National Geographic expedition of a few years ago, we now have a line of weather stations which go up to about 8,100 meters. And so there's several that are up there above the Khumbu Icefall. And until recently, there'd been telemetry and data out so we could have real time observations of what the weather was. So previous to that, I think that expedition was maybe 20192020 or something like that. Before that then really we had a dearth of high elevation weather observations. So they've been really, really enlightening for this specific region. What I would say is that further afield we don't have that luxury. Of course, this is Mount Everest and of course it attracts that sort of major investment and major expedition to have these weather stations put. And we don't have them elsewhere, but in this particular location we are actually quite fortunate now to have some reasonable weather observations.

Emily Gracie (14:04)

Okay, and are you working on a project this coming year that's going to help with that?

Duncan Quincy (14:09)

For sure, yeah. So we've got an expedition going out in April, May of this year and we're interested in what's happening on the surface of the glacier at that sort of elevation. So that the surface at about 6,000 to 7,000 meter up there is, is not actually glacier ice at that point. Well, it's, it's in this transitionary phase that we call fern, and that's where the snow has been repeatedly laid on top of the previous year's snow. And the previous year's snow is gradually being compressed. So it's not snow and it's not glassier ice. It's kind of this intermediate phase. And what we think is that as the melt water at that sort of elevation infiltrates into that transitionary fern, then it releases quite a lot of latent heat and it warms up that fern and actually begins to create a glacier which is much warmer than the surrounding atmospheric temperatures. And this is something which is only recently starting to be realized in different glacier ice regions of the world. We have almost no observations of this at very high elevation, which is what we plan to do here. And so these should be the first sort of observations that tell us about the precondition and factors for glaciers within this region. And so hand in hand with that, we'll of course be putting up our own weather station data because that will tell us about the incoming and outgoing energy sources. It will tell us about when there are melt events. And therefore we can then link those melt events that we see within the weather station data to what we see within the boreholes that we're going to drill into the, into the fern at that sort of height.

Emily Gracie (15:48)

Have you been before?

Duncan Quincy (15:50)

I've been to the Everest region many times. I've been up to base camp 8, 9, 10 times now, but never beyond. So this is my first time going beyond Everest Base Camp through the Khumbu ice fallen into the western comb. So I'm pretty Excited about that? A little bit nervous, I have to admit. But. But yeah, I mean, once in a lifetime opportunity for a scientist. Of course, the climbers that this is what they do, but the scientists like me, I generally tend to like to keep my feet on the ground rather than be hanging from a rock face or anything like that. So this will be a challenge. It'll be a challenge for me and it'll be a challenge for our team. But, you know, we're hugely excited. Like, this is going to be an epic trip and if we can get any observations from up there, then we'll be chuffed a bit.

Emily Gracie (16:33)

I assume that you have a pretty good plan of attack when it comes to, like, a team. Are you bringing a lot of. I know there's like the porters and the Sherpas and you're carrying weather equipment. Right. So what's. What's the support team look like?

Duncan Quincy (16:48)

Yeah, so we work very closely with a Nepali logistics organization, Himalayan Research Expeditions, so they're used to doing this sort of work. Although even for them, I guess this will probably be a push in terms of the elevations. So we'll have a whole support team. We'll have many porters which are carrying the equipment through to those elevations. You know, probably I would imagine, double figures in terms of the number of porters that we'll have. We'll have a couple of very experienced guides to be able to take us through that zone and to be able to stay with us up there. And then we'll have a cook and the cooks team so that we're not coming back from a day in the field and having to deal with our own meal preparations and that sort of thing. So, yeah, it's a big team effort all around.

Emily Gracie (17:37)

Why is it important to have this information? Why do we need to know about the climate of Everest?

Duncan Quincy (17:42)

This is a region that is very much dependent on natural resources for sustainable development. So as you go down from the glaciers or as you walk up to the glaciers, you pass through many villages who are all using the water in some way, shape or form that come from these glaciers. That comes also just more generally from the precipitation that then feeds into groundwater and then brings the water through groundwater springs. So they're using it for hydropower and they're using it for sanitation, for irrigation of the fields. So any changes to this supply in whatever shape or form, that's going to impact on food security, for example, but also energy production, just basic living needs for the people of this region. And that's the same in Everest. As it is right across the whole of High Mountain Asia. So very, very strong connection between the people and the natural resources that these glaciers and the climate ultimately is providing, as well as it having, you know, huge cultural and spiritual value. The mountains are extremely important to the people of this region, often from a religious point of view. And so when they're seeing year in, year out, these environments change. And then it has big practical implications, but it also has big spiritual implications as well.

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Emily Gracie (19:58)

I know there's been a lot of discussion too about how the area is treated by people who are climbing it as far as, you know, leaving trash or themselves when they die. So I'm curious when you've been up there, what you've seen as far as litter. And then also I read an article about how warming temperatures are unearthing bodies that were never seen before because so many people have died in this attempt.

Duncan Quincy (20:24)

Yeah, I mean when I've been there, there have certainly been, there's been evidence of, of rubbish being stored within areas. I mean this is inevitable given the footfall that, that goes through this part of Nepal every year. And there's been big efforts in recent years to, to clean a lot of that up. So it's still a very beautiful environment and I would encourage anybody who's interested to go to go and enjoy it while we can. It really is an amazing site. There is some degradation, there is litter about the place in places. But as I say, there's a large effort at the moment to clean this up. And the Sagamatha Pollution Control Corporation SPCC are doing a lot of work in this area. They've been tasked with bringing down a lot of the rubbish from above every space camp. So there has perhaps been some expeditions who have left some of their equipment behind because they've been doing no more use for it, some equipment may be discarded, that sort of thing. So SBCC has been bringing down tens of kilometers worth of rubbish within the last few years and now they're moving to a drone based system where this can be done semi automated. So real hope there that we can clean this mountain up quite quickly. I think in terms of people and bodies melting out, this is thankfully not something which I've come across up to this point. I can imagine that there are bodies within the glacial ice and it will take tens, probably hundreds of years for them to be transported through that system. The way the glacier moves is that if those bodies are incorporated within the glacier at high elevation, then they will be taken down almost on a semi vertical trajectory into the glacier to start with. And then below the equilibrium line, that's when it will start to reemerge towards the surface. Because the glacier kind of moves inaccurate layers. So if you get stored in the glacier at the very top, you will get taken all the way through the glacial system and you will re emerge down at the very terminus. So that would take hundreds of years for that to occur. So it largely depends on where bodies have been incorporated into the glacial system as to when they might melt out. But this is something that we're seeing actually in many glaciers across the world now. A lot of things emerging, you know, airplanes in some instances that have crashed and been taken within the glacial system and reemerging old climbing equipment is quite common. And this is something we'll see more and more of as the glaciers melt down and a lot of that and glacial material is revealed.

Emily Gracie (23:21)

I mean, it's so sad, but at the same time it's so fascinating because all these old mysteries are being solved. Like the recent wasn't a boot recently discovered from the Mallory Irvine mission and this, we're talking 100 years ago. And now all of a sudden these perfectly preserved things are being discovered.

Duncan Quincy (23:42)

Yeah, I think there's a lot of secrets that are wrapped up within these glaciers. They've been around a long time and they've seen a lot of, a lot of tragedy. They've seen a lot of attempts with people, you know, enjoying themselves and, and challenging themselves within these sorts of environments. So periodically you do get these big news stories, don't you, where something interesting has appeared at the, at the foot of the glass year and you can link it back to exactly who it belonged to and what they were doing at the time. So it's fascinating. It's. Of course there is a tragic element to it sometimes. But a lot of the materials are. Are just interesting from. From that, from that. For that. For their own sake.

Emily Gracie (24:21)

So the work that you're doing, is it just looking at the future or does any of it look to the past? Are you trying to uncover any sort of old climate data?

Duncan Quincy (24:31)

We are looking back into the past as well. We're trying to understand then how important this process of the meltwater infiltrating into the. Into the snow and the ice at very high elevation, how important that's been for. For the glacier behavior over the last 40 or 50 years, the sort of time period that we can expect to get decent satellite coverage, for example, imagery of the glaciers, and that we have. Have. Have some form of reliable weather station data. So once we establish with our numerical models how it's behaving now, then we'll be able to force it with some of those historical climate data, and we'll be able to see then how important this process is in comparison to some others that may be taking place at those sorts of elevations too.

Emily Gracie (25:19)

I asked my colleague Scott if he. Because this was his first time to Everest, but he would love to go back and do the summit one day. I asked him if he had any questions for you, and he had real concerns about the future. And he said, how much longer will we be able to do this? How much longer are people going to be allowed to do this?

Duncan Quincy (25:39)

I think we'll be able to do that, do it for a long time, but I think that it will change very rapidly. The experience that an individual has depending on when they go. So I think the landscape that Scott has been able to enjoy until, well, recently has been. Is one which is funny night. So each year when I go back, I tend to look down on the Kumbu Glacier from the lateral moraine. So the moraine's the sediment which is piled up on the sides of the glaciers and the. And you get to the top of that moraine and you look down now on a glacier. And that glacier used to sit at the crest of that moraine that you're standing at, and it gets lower and lower and lower. You know, in places it's probably 100 meters below the surface where you're standing, which is quite incredible. And you look at it and there's more and more meltwater which is ponded on the surface. And so it's going to become increasingly difficult for people like Scott then to navigate their way across that sort of terrain because you have to get down from those moraines onto the Glacier surface. Some people who want to trek around the passes, they actually have to cross the glaciers as they go. And so it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate your way through the surface ponds. And in some places, it's almost not possible now for you to be able to do that, certainly not very safely anyway. And so I think it's going to be a very changing landscape. Ultimately then, the people who are going to Everest Base Camp, I think it's probably okay. You largely go on paths which aren't directly affected by the glaciers. But then for people who want to go beyond that and are actually having to climb through the glacial mass itself, through the ice fall, it's going to become increasingly fraught with danger, I think. And so will there come a point where actually it becomes impassable? Possibly. Our model data show that at some point that lower part of the glacier is actually going to detach from the upper part of the glacier. So it will just be like a stagnant block of ice sitting down at the bottom. And then the top part of the glacier will be avalanching onto that lower part. They won't actually be connected anymore physically. So actually trying to navigate your way through that area where there's ice peeling off and avalanching down, maybe there will become a point where they say, enough is enough. You can't actually go that way anymore, and you have to radically change the route up Mount Everest. That is quite possible.

Emily Gracie (28:01)

Wow. Yeah. Sounds dangerous. Wow. Duncan, is there anything else you want to add about this or your research?

Duncan Quincy (28:09)

No, I think I would just emphasize that the reason we do this really is to be able to get a better understanding of how these sorts of changes that we're seeing that you're looking at, I'm looking at from a different point of view, are really impacting the environment and how that impact then on the people. Because ultimately, that's why we care. That's the most important thing for the people of this region, is to have a better understanding of how their water supply is going to change over the next hundred years, something like this. Because at the moment, there's high uncertainty in that. I think it's really important that we continue to do this sort of research. And that attracts funding to be able to do it so that we can make those projections with a bit more certainty and people can. Can live their lives with a bit more certainty, knowing what's going to be coming in 10 years from now and that sort of thing.

Emily Gracie (28:58)

I'm. I'm always curious about kind of the intersect between physical science and social science, and we do it with weather. We talk about hurricanes here in the US and communities that they're impacted. How did you, how do you gain that knowledge of the, the people of Nepal and, and what their needs are and what, how this affects their lives. Are you working with people who, who study them or the communities themselves?

Duncan Quincy (29:21)

Yeah, a bit of both. So we tend to take a fairly interdisciplinary approach to the work that we do. So we do often work with social scientists and anthropologists who are people who are looking at the communities, working with them or embedded within them in an ideal scenario. We also have very close partnerships with academics within Kathmandu University, Tribhan University and Isimod. They're all based in Kathmandu and they're all very much focused on the people of the region, the environments of the region. And so I think that's the best way that as academics from the UK or from the US we work also with people from the US that the best way that we can really get a good understanding of what the people of the region are concerned about, what they don't know, what they do know, what we all don't know, what we all do know. I think it's working hand in hand with them. So it's partnerships with other academics from the region who then give us the links into the organizations that are working with community on the ground and we can feed our findings into them so that then they can make better decisions going forward.

Emily Gracie (30:32)

Well, best of luck in this expedition. Can we catch back up with you this summer and see what's come of it?

Duncan Quincy (30:38)

Yeah, that'd be fantastic. I'd enjoy that.

Emily Gracie (30:40)

Wonderful. Dungan, thank you so much.

Duncan Quincy (30:42)

Thanks a lot. Cheers.

Emily Gracie (30:45)

Off the Radar is a production of the National Weather Desk. Make sure you're following the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes publish every Tuesday. Also, off the Radar is now on Instagram. Make sure you give us a follow so you can see snippets from the show as well as lots of other great weather content. If you missed part one of this series series, go back and check it out. We heard a firsthand account of what it's like to climb Mount Everest. Thank you to Duncan Quincy for sharing his expertise today. This episode was produced and edited by myself and co written with associate producer Brian Petras. Thank you to the National Weather Desk and Sinclair Broadcast Group for their ongoing support of the podcast. I'm meteorologist Emily Gracie. Make it a great day.

Duncan Quincy (31:41)

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