World’s highest weather stations reveal intense sunshine may be melting ice on Mount Everest

SAN FRANCISCO — Data from a network of newly installed weather stations atop Mount Everest shows that the mountain experiences some of the most intense sunlight on the planet.

As alpine mountaineers are all too aware, the sun can be brutally fierce atop snow-capped peaks. Preliminary data from the weather stations on Mount Everest suggests this effect is amplified to an astounding degree at the top of the world, creating what could be some of the most intense illumination anywhere on Earth’s surface.

This epic lighting does more than give hikers nasty sunburns. In a warming world, it might be hastening ice melt atop the world’s highest mountains and impacting glaciers in ways scientists do not fully understand.

Presented at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco on Friday, the data is among the first scientificresults to emerge from the National Geographic Society’s and Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Extreme Expedition to Everest, a multidisciplinary effort to study climate change atop the world’s tallest mountain.

As part of the field excursion last spring, researchers installed a network of five automatic weather stations at elevations of up to 27,600 feet, which includes the two highest weather stations on the planet.

These stations are helping to fill a critical gap in our understanding of high alpine meteorology and climate: Before their installation, the highest operating weather station the researchers knew of sat atop nearby Mera Peak, at a paltry altitude of about 21,000 feet.

“There’s still a lot of ice in the Himalayas above that altitude,” said Tom Matthews, a climate scientist at Loughborough University in Britain and the meteorology co-lead for the expedition. “It’s a monumental data gap.”

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