Two of the world’s most celebrated mountaineers have once again rewritten the record books, scaling Mount Everest for the 30th and 10th times respectively. The so-called ‘Everest Man’, Kami Rita Sherpa, 54, and ‘Mountain Queen’, Lhakpa Sherpa, 49, have achieved these milestones in successive climbs this week. Their feats, however, cannot be divorced from the broader physical reality of the climate crisis.
The Himalayan glaciers, which have fed the region’s rivers for millennia, are losing mass at an accelerating rate. Since 2000, average temperatures in the Everest region have risen by 0.6 degrees Celsius per decade, twice the global average.
This has caused the Khumbu Glacier to thin by up to 15 metres per year, destabilising the climbing routes that guides like Kami Rita have known for decades. Lhakpa Sherpa, who summited for the first time in 2000, now traverses a landscape of rockfall and crevasses that were absent in her early career. Their achievements are a testament to human endurance and expertise, but they also serve as a data point in the grim tally of biosphere collapse.
The mountaineering community’s celebration is well founded, but the calm urgency of the situation demands that we recognise these records as beacons of a world that is vanishing. The same heat that feeds the jet stream and drives extreme weather is also melting the ice on which these climbers rely. As we honour their triumph, we must also accelerate the energy transition that could slow the thaw.
