Expedition Everest: The Science - 360 | National Geographic

[Music] Everest is an iconic place. To be able to search the changes this high up is critically important to science. Once you get to about 5,000 meters or around base camp, you are above where most of the science on the planet has been done. The big goal of this expedition is to collect scientific information about climate change.

What we're doing in assessing how climate change is affecting species, we're doing an elevational biodiversity survey to identify all the species that live in the environment based on the water samples. All right, lake. All right, that should be good. You want that hole closest to the edge so you don't stand there. She'll be all right.

By studying the species up here and how they're adapting, that might teach us ways that we have to consider adapting ourselves. Yeah, how far up on our planet Earth does our human imprint reach? And what extent we want to investigate how this imprint accelerates snow and ice melting?

So we are collecting a bunch of snow samples, but we are also collecting detailed measurements of surface reflectance. That box a lot, it's at the top. So many life livelihoods depend on what's happening upstream, up high with the ice, with the snow. Twenty percent of the world lives downstream of these really vulnerable glaciers here in the Himalaya, and what people decide to do downstream affects high-altitude environments.

To bring any change or any solutions, first, we need to understand the problem and what these glaciers are going to. Mapping is an extremely useful tool in understanding across the glaciers and how they are changing. A picture is worth a thousand words. If you have a lot of pictures, you can create a very illustrative map with lots of information.

That is very, very essential to understand these glaciers and their dynamics. What we're going to be able to do then is compare Basecamp back into the past and into the future. [Music] And this gives us a super detailed look at the ice and how it's going to be changing and how it has changed. [Music] [Music]

My role here is to collect ice core and snow samples on the way up from Kampalashur across there to go Icefall up to 8,000 meters. It's possible nobody before studied ice cores from data elevation, and that will be a new puzzle piece that provides data and better understanding of what's happening at higher elevations. [Music]

We want to know in real-time what's going on. The bounty the weather station sees a whole year's worth of weather possibilities. Then we can use machine learning to provide a totally different approach to how you can forecast weather. To have a weather station where you're literally touching the next level of the atmosphere is critically important.

The very idea that the highest part of the planet has been impacted by human activity ought to be a real wake-up call. [Music] You! [Laughter]