In the year since the accident, attention has also turned to human impacts on the ecology of Mount Everest. Researchers and climbers told VICE News that as the number of ascents each year has increased, so has the amount of garbage and human waste left behind. And climate change, they say, may be transforming the mountain, bringing greater risks as glaciers melt and the mountain surface becomes more unstable.
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70,000 and 100,000 visitors descend upon Mount Everest each year, Alton Byers, director of science and exploration at the US-based Mountain Institute, told VICE News. At base camp, visitors annually produce about 12,000 pounds of human waste each year, which often ends up in the waterways that nearby villages rely upon, he said.
"It's getting notorious — people getting sick from water contaminated by dumping human waste," he told VICE News.
Further downhill from base camp, lodge owners who house visitors before and after climbs use septic tanks that often leak, further polluting the water, Byers said. Springs have dried up due to warmer temperatures and changing precipitation patterns. In this way, the pollution is a "climate change stressor," he said, worsening the effects of global warming. Adding to the ecological degradation, lodge owners dispose of solid waste in huge, open-air garbage pits.
"The place is getting covered with landfills, creating an environmental hazard for humans and animals," Byers said.
'What we're seeing is a massive reduction in glacial cover and a lot of instability.'
Waste is an equally complex issue further up the mountain, where climbers frequent the same few routes to attempt safe ascents — and where they leave behind their refuse to avoid carrying any extra weight. Plastics, tents, oxygen tanks, and even the corpses of past climbers lay scattered on the slope.
Nepal's government has told climbers to bring down an amount of garbage on their descent equal to what they left behind, and a local guide, Dawa Stevens Sherpa, has started a non-profit to pay people who bring down waste.
But even these well-intentioned efforts at conservation have run into problems. The nearby village of Gork Shep has served as a dump for Mount Everest waste, but has already reached its limit, meaning waste must be hauled further downhill.
"It's unsightly but they ran out of room at Gork Shep, so they're taking it lower," Garry Porter, an engineer working in the region, told VICE News. "It's an eyesore."
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