A documentary crew has discovered human remains on Mount Everest apparently belonging to a man who disappeared while trying to reach the summit 100 years ago, National Geographic magazine reported Friday.
Climate change is increasingly reducing snow and ice around the Himalayas. expose the bodies of climbers who died while pursuing their dream of climbing the highest mountain in the world.
British man Andrew Irvine disappeared in 1924 alongside his climbing partner George Mallory as the two men attempted to be the first to reach the summit of Everest, 8,848 meters (29,029 feet) above sea level.
Mallory’s body was found in 1999 But clues to Irvine’s fate were elusive until a National Geographic team discovered a boot, still covering the remains of a foot, on the summit’s central Rongbuk Glacier.
Upon closer inspection, they found a sock with “a red label with AC IRVINE sewn into it,” the magazine reported.
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The discovery could provide additional clues to the location of the team’s 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 Irvine and Mallory as the first to successfully summit the summit, almost three decades before the first currently recognized summit in 1953 by climbers Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
“It tells the whole story of what probably happened,” Julie Summers, Irvine’s great-niece, told National Geographic.
The first documented ascent of Everest occurred almost three decades later, when New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay scaled the mountain on May 29, 1953. In 1963, Jim Whittaker became the first American to reach the summit.
Hundreds of climbers have died on Everest
Members of the Irvine family reportedly offered to share DNA samples to confirm the identity of the remains.
Irvine was 22 when he disappeared.
He and Mallory were last spotted by one of their expedition members on the afternoon of June 8, 1924, after beginning their final ascent to the summit that morning.
Earlier this year, Mallory’s last letter to his wife was 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.”
It is believed that Irvine carried a camera, the discovery of which could rewrite the history of mountaineering.
Photographer and filmmaker Jimmy Chin, who was part of the National Geographic team, believes the discovery “certainly narrows the search area” for the elusive camera.
More than 300 people have died on the mountain since expeditions began in the 1920s.
Some are hidden by snow or buried in deep crevasses.
Others, still in their colorful climbing gear, became landmarks on the route to the summit and were given gallows humor nicknames, including “Green Boots” and “Sleeping Beauty “.
In June, five frozen bodies were found of Mount Everest – including one that was only skeletal remains – as part of Nepal’s mountain clean-up campaign on Everest and adjacent peaks Lhotse and Nuptse.
