By james art A documentary team has discovered human remains on Mount Everest, apparently belonging to a man who disappeared while trying to climb the summit 100 years ago, National Geographic magazine reported Friday.
Climate change is thinning the snow and ice around the Himalayas exposing the bodies of mountaineers who died chasing their dream of climbing the highest mountain in the world.
Briton Andrew Irvine disappeared in 1924 with his climbing partner George Mallory as the pair attempted to be the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest, 8,848 meters (29,029 ft) above sea level.
Mallory’s body was opened in 1999 but clues to Irvine’s fate were elusive until a National Geographic team discovered a boot, still wearing the remains of a foot, on the Rongbuk Central Glacier at the summit.
Upon closer inspection, they found a sock with “a red tag with AC IRVINE sewn into it,” the magazine reported.
The discovery could provide further clues to the location of the team’s personal belongings and could help solve one of mountaineering’s most enduring mysteries: whether Irvine and Mallory ever made it to the summit.
This could confirm that Irvine and Mallory were the first to successfully climb the summit, nearly three decades before the first recognized summit in 1953 by climbers Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
“It tells the whole story of what probably happened,” Irvine’s great-niece Julie Summers told National Geographic.
“I’ve lived with this story since I was 7 years old when my father told us about the mystery of Uncle Sandy on Everest,” she said. “When Jimmy told me he saw the name AC Irvine on the sock tag in the boot, I cried. It was and will remain an extraordinary and touching moment.”
The first documented ascent of Everest took place almost three decades later, when New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay climbed the mountain on May 29, 1953. In 1963. Jim Whittaker became the first American to climb the summit.
Hundreds of climbers have died on Everest
Members of the Irvine family have reportedly offered to share DNA samples to confirm the identity of the remains.
Irvine was 22 years old when he disappeared.
He, along with Mallory, were last seen by a member of their expedition on the afternoon of June 8, 1924, after they had begun their final ascent to the summit that morning.
Earlier this year, Mallory’s Last Letter of his wife has been digitized for the first time and published online by the University of Cambridge. In the letter, he wrote that his odds of reaching the world’s highest peak were “50 to 1 against us”.
Irvine is believed to have carried a vest camera, the discovery of which could rewrite mountaineering history.
“It was a monumental and emotional moment for us and our entire team on the ground, and we just hope that this can finally bring peace to his relatives and the climbing world at large,” said the climbing team member and researcher at National Geographic Jimmy Chin.
Chin did not say exactly where the remains were found because he wanted to discourage trophy hunters. But he is confident that other objects – and perhaps even the camera – are nearby.
“It certainly reduces the search area,” he told National Geographic.
More than 300 people have died on the mountain since expeditions began in the 1920s.
Some are hidden by snow or swallowed by deep crevasses.
Others, still in their colorful climbing gear, have become landmarks on the way to the top and have been given humorous nicknames such as “Green Boots” and “Sleeping Beauty.”
in june five frozen bodies were recovered from Mount Everest — including one that was only skeletal remains — as part of Nepal’s mountain clean-up campaign on Everest and neighboring peaks Lhotse and Nuptse.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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