National Geographic reported that a documentary film team discovered human remains on Mount Everest, apparently belonging to a man who went missing while attempting to summit the peak 100 years ago, according to CBS News.
Climate change is thinning the snow and ice around the Himalayas, increasingly exposing the bodies of other climbers. Briton Andrew Irvine went missing in 1924 along with climbing partner George Mallory as the pair attempted to first reach the summit of Mount Everest, 8,848 metres (2,929 feet) above sea level.
Mallory’s body was found in 1999, but clues about Irvine’s fate were unclear until a National Geographic team discovered a boot on the peak’s Central Rongbuk Glacier. Upon closer inspection, they found a sock with “a red label that has A.C. IRVINE stitched into it.”
The find could provide further evidence of the whereabouts of the team’s personal belongings and help solve one of mountaineering’s biggest mysteries: whether Irvine and Mallory made it to the summit. If confirmed, they could become the first to successfully climb the peak, almost three decades before the first currently recognised summit in 1953 by climbers Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
More than 300 people have died on the mountain since expeditions began in the 1920s. Some of them are buried in snow or trapped in deep crevasses. In June, five frozen bodies were retrieved from Everest as part of Nepal’s campaign to clean up Mount Everest and the neighbouring peaks of Lhotse and Nuptse.
