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Why Climbers Die On Mount Everest
Science Daily reports that researchers have conducted the first detailed analysis of deaths during expeditions to the summit of Mt. Everest. They found that
most deaths occur during descents from the summit in the so-called "death zone" above 8,000 meters, and also identified factors that appear to be associated with a greater risk of death, particularly symptoms of high-altitude cerebral edema. The big surprise that the data indicate those deaths aren't primarily from avalanches or falling ice, as had long been believed.
Still, on the list of ways to kick the bucket, beats slipping in the shower any day.
Um. If the chance of dying increases with time in the "death zone", and descents happen toward the end of your time in said zone, then duh. News flash: Chance of death increases proportional to time without adequate O2.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Nope... bends is caused by nitrogen bubbles forming in your bloodstream, due to diving or rising too quickly.
Not exactly. The bends come from fast decompression leading to gas bubbles within the body while the cerebral edema is an excess accumulation of water in the brain which comes from a leakage of fluid from capillaries (among other causes).
There seem to be a lot of people who really shouldn't climb it because they aren't nearly as well trained as they think they are, and yet climb it anway..... Thats gotta rank up there for reasons why people die up there.
Monstar L
Climbers die on the way down. It's more dangerous, you're more fatigued and your guard is down. You also tend to ignore clear signs of physical harm.
The higher you climb, the harder your lungs have to work to extract enough oxygen from the air in order to keep you alive. If you don't get enough oxygen, you don't die immediately. Your brain starts becoming less and less efficient, since it cannot produce energy anaerobically, like the rest of your body can.
Of course, this process is invisible to most people. Its comparable to how your brain isn't fully awake if you get woken up suddenly and feeling confused at the simplest tasks. Hypoxia also affects divers.
The leakage of fluid from the vessels in the brain is caused by the same hypoxia, since the blood vessels need energy as well.
The only solution is for climbers to take their own oxygen, or for someone to invent a mobile and low powered oxygen concentrator.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
People exhaust themselves climbing up, but most when they do realize they are in trouble will turn back...or perhaps they realize they have enough and push on to get up there, but don't leave enough in reserve to come back down. Also there's a false sense of achievement - "I made it to the summit!" - but while making it back down alive is actually more improtant it may be anticlimactic and not as big a motivator when you're spent after the effort of reaching the top.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
That's why!
The reason that nobody Rs TFA is because the answers are so bleeding obvious.
It has nothing to do with O2 - the deaths are caused by Yetis.
Like many guard dogs, they will happily let you onto the property. They just don't let you back out again.
Thus, you can only get the bends going up.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It's just a name, like the Forbidden Zone or the Zone of no Return. All the zones have names like that on the Mountain of Terror
"I think so, Brain, but 'instant karma' always gets so lumpy." - Pinky
"Decepticons FOREVER!!!" - Ravage
I have never seen anyone claim that the primary cause of death on Everest is avalanche or falling ice - I'm not sure where that fiction came from. It is common knowledge that the primary cause of death up there is directly related with complications from being in the dead zone, combined with the complications of frequent blizzards that hamper the attempts to get out of the dead zone. Climbers run out of oxygen and also get lost. Some have to be left behind by others because all are under distress and unable to help the straggler. It's a very deadly place to go and is foolish in that one in ten end up dying up there.
when it came to cheaters in sports, they'll do things like dope with epo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythropoietin
and blood bank: inject their own previously extracted, concentrated red blood cells back into themselves before the run/ bike (with the subsequent increase in clot risk, of course)
of course, why can't climbers do this as well? take all of the illegal things they do in sports and apply it legally. of course, they are raising their risk of death with some of these body modifications, but at a lower, controlled risk than that from climbing a mountain without any body preparation at all
regardless, any climber should spend time running marathons in the high alps or the high sierra to increase red blood cell production naturally, if you are not genetically a sherpa
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hmm why do climbers die on everest? wweellll jeeez, its a giant mound of rock and ice that humans are not designed to be climbing on naturally. Thanks for the clarification science!
Just in case
Not for anyone who watched "Into thin air".
Or Vertical Limit.
Vertical limit had as much fact about mountaineering as the movie "Hackers" had about computers.
The goal of computer science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
"Hackers" was about computers?!
No that's just a myth started by the same people who thought Smallville was about Superman.
Climbers die while descending Mount Everest because even though hundreds of people capable of rescuing them pass, all of those people have paid upwards of $25,000 to have a chance to summit the peak, and none of those assholes are willing to risk their precious experience to save someone's life.
Well, Anonymous Coward, that's not entirely true. While I'm not a climber, I've read numerous books on climbing Everest, as well as watched several documentaries and talked to some climbers about it. As I understand it, once you're in the death zone, *every step* is an ordeal. You literally think about it, lift your foot, move it, and put it down, then think about the next one. Apparently it's like trying to walk with a 200 pound backpack on. In many cases, if you're climbing Everest and you come upon someone in need of assistance, even if you want to, there's nothing you can do. You can't carry someone in the death zone, there's no sled to put them on, no ski patrol with a helicopter. Basically, all you can do is give them your oxygen bottle, make them comfortable, and then get back to trudging. Tragic, but true.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
H3y! I s4w Hackers and it was T3H Sh1T! Its r34lly cool! Just cause old people liek you dun get it!!!!!1!! dont dis what you dont g-3-t!!!!
:)
Goodness, I feel dirty just writing that
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Holy cow, I previewed my post and it came out huge, but I can't take anything out, it's my Cliff Notes version of "Into Thin Air", quite relevant to the topic at hand.
Not for anyone who watched "Into thin air".
Although I've never seen the movie, I highly recommend the book by John Krakauer.
A pretty good climber and professional journalist, Krakauer was commissioned by National Geographic to write an article about attempting the summit of Everest, embedded into a group composed of a few world-class climbers, the Sherpa support team and a bunch of wealthy tourists, including a socialite or two.
Krakauer relates some lethally incompetent things that went on up there, try this one on for size - there were three or four teams camping in the North Col, final camp for the summit assault and already above the "death zone". A member of the Taiwanese team came out of his tent wearing nothing but socks, to take a dump on the icy edge of the very high and steep Lhotse Face. Images of shit cascading down a Himalayan ice face aside, it's not only bad form (there can always be climbers making their way up) but also dangerous as hell. Well the dumb bastard slipped and tumbled over a thousand meters to his death, buck-naked except for his socks, on the frozen roof of the world. You can't make stuff like this up, seriously.
Just a couple of hundred meters from the summit via the Lhotse route, there's a small but nasty vertical wall called The Hillary Step, which can only be climbed one person at a time. On the way up, Krakauer saw to his dismay that there was a bottleneck here, taking a few hours for everybody to make it past this final obstacle, time already against them. Once on the summit, the teams lingered in a daze even as the monsoon clouds were looming large.
On the way back, the bottleneck was reversed, now there was a line to climb down the Hillary Step. By the time everybody had passed, it was already too late - the sun was setting, the canned oxygen supply was running out, the storm was already there and temperatures were plummeting, textbook description of a worst-case scenario.
Every breath and step a battle that took every ounce of effort and concentration, Krakauer staggered down in zero-visibility conditions, passing some dying or dead comrades along the way, finally reaching the North Col at around midnight.
Here's the thing - even with optimal visibility and mellow temperatures, severe fatigue (that inner reserve of energy was depleted in the final push for the summit) and lack of oxygen will impair the ability to think, reason, move and react in a place where any misstep can be fatal. Many climbers have passed dead colleagues on the way down and that information does not compute in their brains at the moment, personal survival overrides any other concern, only later do horror and regret coalesce and sink their hooks.
Anyway, Krakauer collapsed in his tent and managed to sleep even while fighting for breath in the "death zone", finally awaking to tragedy unfolding around him, I believe it was eighteen people who died on the mountain that time.
Well that's more or less how I remember "Into Thin Air". Give it a shot, it managed to be gripping even as I already knew the story.
Finally, a great climbing movie and true story, done as a documentary with dramatizations, is "Touching The Void", in which two British guys climb a South American peak. On the way down (surprise surprise), one of them falls to certain death, off a cliff and into a crevasse - only he survives. Alone and with a shattered leg, he must drag his way back down the mountain before his distraught teammate abandons base camp, or be truly left for dead.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
I climb. The highest peak I've climbed is 18,700 ft (Pico de Orizaba) and it was only -32 f at the summit (I've had 2 ascents) at the coldest.
High altitude Pulmonary or Cerebral edema has been a major killer of excellent climbers - and you can climb to the same altitude a dozen times and show no signs - and die on the 13th.
Nanda Devi Unsoeld - Willie's only daughter and Crag's sister died on the mountain she was named for in 1976. I'd met her in the Tetons in the early 1970s. She had climbed many peaks higher than her namesake - but passed away from High Altitude Pulmonary Edema while stuck at altitude due to a storm.
Everest is 29,205 ft - Denali is the highest peak in the western hemisphere at 20,320 ft - but more people die from football injuries every year than climbing.
As for Krakauer - he revels in writing about death - I despise his writing. He made his name writing about the death of Christopher McCandless - a man who thought he could overwinter Alaska in a converted school-bus. That's a tragedy - not "news." and the book, Into the Wild is as corrupt a bit of "if it bleeds, it leads" journalism as exists.
I find Krakauer cheesy and a glorifier of death - a sick puppy where I come from.
This isn't news at all. Mount Everrest actually is a mountain for sissies, technically speaking. The standard route to the summit is more of an extended hike than an actual climb compared to 'real' mountains such as the Cerro Torre. At sea level it would be a more like a walk in the park, literaly.
The difficult part with Everest is taking your time to aclimatise - which can take up to half a year. Which most people don't do. Others take O2 with them. Yet O2 only means you won't die inmediately in the death zone if your gear doesn't fail, it doesn't mean making the summit is a sure bet. Most people die on Everest because the lack of O2 gets to their brain and they start doing stupid things. Meaning more stupid things than going up there unprepared in the first place. That's why the standard route is littred with corpses.
If it were a real mountain that required actual high-profile tech-climbing skills, we'd have much less idiots dying up there, simply because they couldn't reach the death-zone.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
A climber intentionally risks many other things, like falling into a crevasse on a glacier, getting caught in a storm on a mountain, etc. I climb, and for me it's very satisfying to manage these risks by making good decisions and surviving in good health from something that is serious business. It's an adventure, and even when it's not a large step for the mankind, it's a kind of personal exploration. Doesn't matter so much if other people charted the glaciers and summits before me, I'm still learning very much about the planet we live on.
The risk management is not unlike driving a car. While driving fast there's a significant risk of death which we manage. People drive cars even when many die while doing just that. Of course it's much more satisfying to do something a bit less mundane in tremendous surroundings. I don't know why, but after my first trip to Himalayas I've had this calling.. It's not something that existed before that, though.
You probably shouldn't equate climbing with the Everest so much. People who go to Everest are the types who want to climb the highest mountains - as if that was the superior achievement. And Everest is relatively easy too, it's only challenging because of the height. Most climbers are happier on lower hills. Most climbers never risk hypoxia. And some climbers still climb mountains that have never been climbed by anyone.
Climbing today might not advance the humanity as a whole very much, but advances still happen. At least the equipment used in climbing and professions who use ropes has developed a great deal during the last decades. It's actually so fast that during my three years of climbing, I'm already seeing technological advances. Also, thanks to the climbers, there's a lot of science done on which knots are the best in saving lives, and which others occasionally fail. This might not get you excited, but it does that to me ;).