Everest Biology - Life is on the Rise | National Geographic
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Mountainous environments are living laboratories to study environmental change. We're up here to document whether species are moving upward. What we're finding in mountainous environments is that species, from plants to animals to insects, are actually rising in elevation and adapting to these thermal niches. We're trying to understand how climate change is impacting them.
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I'm leading a biology team to perform a comprehensive biodiversity survey of the Kumbu Valley. What we're doing up here is trying to understand what species are living up in these extreme environments. Having our researchers go up higher to survey for things like plants, rodents, and insects, comparing it to historical data from previous expeditions can give us a lot of information about whether we can actually define how quickly these species are already moving upwards.
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The two types of surveys we'll be doing are water filtration, collecting water samples, doing things like turning over rocks, looking underneath and seeing what's there. As a biologist, I focus in on the micro scale to really look for my new little details. It's great working with Anton as a partner because he can step back and look at it from a more holistic understanding background, looking at the climatology of landscapes. That helps us understand better the organisms that we're studying in the context of the landscape.
In terms of the ability to respond to climatic changes, different species have different capacities for response. To use a local example, purebred yaks can no longer live at the elevation of where they used to live. My whole family has lived in these mountains their whole life. They have seen changes themselves and they've lived through changes before.
We could see yaks down to Namche, but now they are no longer able to tolerate the warming climate here, so they have to move around. These small minute observations are actually very much important for any sort of scientific based understanding.
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When we come up here to do our visual encounter surveys, we'll pick a piece of habitat that looks really good for our species. The soil will be well developed; there will be plants. We'll turn over rocks. Well, that's a bristle tank; you got him! When we find something, we'll collect the animal in a plastic tube so we can photograph and measure it and document it.
He's got these sticking up; the slope is incredibly unstable, rocks constantly in motion. There are pebbles and rocks covering the surface, but when you remove them, look underneath. We're finding that basically soils are developed; there's mosses, there's little tussock grasses—basically, an ecosystem seems to actually be developing under the surface of this very unstable rocky substrate. There’s much more life up here than meets the eye at first glance, that's for sure.
When we get back to the lab, we'll do analysis combined with reaching out to local experts like entomologists and botanists to be able to identify all the species at the taxonomic level.
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If there are any micromore organisms in here, they'll be throughout the solution. What we're trying to do is gather as much information as possible to really understand how can we adapt to climate change. How can people adapt to living up here? How are species adapting? This climate change study doesn't end here.
As scientists, we want to provide the impetus so that these studies can continue on for years to come, so that people can have a better understanding of what's happening and how to adapt as we move forward.
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