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Tents set up at Everest Base Camp. While pit-vault toilets collect waste for about 2,000 people, which is then hauled downhill, almost everyone urinates on the glacier, a water source communities drink from. Photo / Getty Images
More than 6000 litres are produced daily by thousands of climbers and guides, according to a study.
Mt Everest, which straddles the border between Nepal and China, is in transition. Study after study shows that it’s melting.
With record numbers of climbers hoping to summit its peak, the mountain has
become a tourist trap. This is especially apparent at Everest Base Camp, where there are espresso bars and big-screen TVs, fast Wi-Fi and hot showers, even tents with Persian carpets and heated floors for the thousands of climbers and the support crew members who spend months there.
Now a new study reveals the cost of this activity to the thawing Khumbu Glacier, with researchers estimating that about 3 million kilograms of glacial ice and snow is lost each spring, thanks to the energy it takes to create these comforts.
In 2023, that meant 824 cylinders of liquefied petroleum gas, 18,935 litres of kerosene and 5130 litres of gasoline were used for cooking, heating and powering about 1600 tents at the base camp.
One of the most shocking findings: human urine is responsible for an estimated 154 tonnes of melt in the Khumbu Glacier.
“If you drink more water, you have to let it out,” Khim Lal Gautam, a geospatial scientist who is the study’s lead author and Nepal’s chief survey officer, said, referring to the body’s need to hydrate more at higher altitudes.
More than 6000 litres are produced daily by thousands of climbers and guides.
Pit-vault toilets collect waste at the base camp for about 2000 people, which is hauled downhill, but most people urinate on the glacier, a water source communities drink from. “You don’t need to be a scientist to see we’re losing more ice every year – you can see it with the naked eye,” said Gautam, who has spent over 365 days on Everest since 2011.
Although the impact of human urine is concerning, Dr Sudeep Thakuri, a Nepali climate scientist and an associate professor at Tribhuvan University who was a co-author of the study, said that the findings were “not really surprising” and that the urine ultimately has less impact than all the fuel used for heating, cooking and lighting.
To conduct the study, Gautam collected data from base camp operators, while, in her office in Louisiana, Virginia Burkett, a study co-author and an emeritus scientist with the US Geological Survey, helped organise decades of satellite data that showed temperature change over time across the glacier, relaying those figures to Gautam as he inspected real-time changes on the glacier.
It wasn’t easy. Low Earth orbit satellites measure infrared radiation or heat emitted, but they can’t get readings if there’s cloud cover, which Everest is notorious for. So the team looked at every cloud-free thermal image from 1991 to 2023, Burkett said. The researchers observed trends in land surface temperature over that period and compared results from the base camp with the snow-covered area of the glacier and a neighbouring site off the glacier.
“That was the stunning effect,” she said. “We found the snow-covered area increased in temperature only half as much as the base camp.”
