Reuters reports that a?team of Nepali climbers will attempt to collect garbage in Mount Everest’s “death zone” (the area above 26,246 feet) for the first time this week. Exhausted climbers have been leaving garbage in the death zone since the 1950′s, but Namgyal?Sherpa, the expedition’s leader, says that global warming has revealed the extent of the problem: “The garbage was buried under snow in the past. But now it has come out on the surface because of the melting of snow due to global warming.” The team also hopes to retrieve the corpse of a climber who died two years ago.[%comments]
Humans Really Do Leave Garbage Everywhere
TAGS: environment
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Sam, why do you care? You’ll never see the top of everest anyway.
“The garbage was buried under snow in the past. But now it has come out on the surface because of the melting of snow due to global warming,” the 30-year-old said.”
I don’t mean to sound like a skeptic, but the snow is melting at 26,000 feet?
Agree Andrew… Eminem is the best. His brand new song Airplanes 2 with Hayley Williams is truely sublime.
That is interesting. I suspect these guys are doing it from a financial motivation. Their income is from taking people to one of the most remote places in the world, and they charge well for it. It kinda ruins the whole adventure feel of it if you get to the top, and find a mars bar wrapper!
Dead bodies lying around might actually add to the adventure feel, I wonder if they did a cost benefit analysis, and market research on that! lol
J, You’re right, that does sound like an odd claim. It could, though they don’t explain in detail, be that climate shifts (local and global) are causing precipitation in the Himalayas to be lower than in the past, therefore less accumulation to bury the trash.
A similar situation is happening to the Kilimanjaro snow cap.
It’s ‘Climate Change’ remember? Global warming was not resonating in the US so they had to change it to something a little more palatable…..
Actually, I’m sure snow is sublimating at 26,000 feet – by all accounts it’s extremely windy at the upper reaches of the mountain. Likewise, I’m sure Everest is subject to cycles of drought, like every other place on the planet. But I suspect all the garbage is a product of the influx of (too many) climbers into an environment where survival frequently requires them to be litterbugs, not global warming.
Unless Everest spans the globe, it’s local snow melt that is revealing the trash, not “global warming.” The snow cover reduction may be due as much to reduced precipitation as to warming (I await data, not supposition), so let’s be more careful about throwing the GW label around.