A Safer Path Up Everest: Adapting to a Warming World
Every spring, climbers from all over the world gather at Everest’s South Base Camp in Nepal. They dream of reaching the top of the world’s highest peak. But for the Sherpas who guide them, the journey is becoming more dangerous each year.
Rising Temperatures and New Routes
Warming temperatures are making the Khumbu Icefall, the most dangerous part of the climb, more unstable. A team from Nepal and France is working on a new route. This path could offer a safer way up Everest. Their work shows how mountain communities are adapting to a changing climate.
Lower Altitudes, New Paths
At lower levels, this new route goes through rock instead of ice. It includes permanent steel steps drilled into the rock and fixed ropes. These features provide extra safety for climbers.
Protecting Sherpas
The new route aims to protect Sherpas. As guides, they climb the mountain many times each season with different groups. This will be the first new path to the summit from Nepal since Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary made their historic climb in 1953.
Work in Progress
French mountaineer Marc Batard and Nepali mountaineer Kaji Sherpa started working on this alternative route in 2022. Bad weather caused delays. The route is expected to be finished in the autumn. However, funding issues have caused more setbacks.
Everest and Climate Change
Mount Everest is nearly 8,850 meters high. It is in Nepal’s Sagarmatha National Park. It is the world’s highest mountain above sea level. Every spring, hundreds of climbers try to reach the summit. The Department of Tourism issued 479 climbing permits in 2023, 421 in 2024, and at least 444 this year.
But Everest is also feeling the effects of climate change. Rising temperatures are thinning glaciers and forming supraglacial ponds. They are also making the current icefall route more unstable. Experts say that if climate change continues at this rate, the safety of climbers and Sherpas, and the livelihoods of local people, will be at risk.
Glacial Activity
Mount Everest is in the Central Himalayas. It is part of the Hindu Kush Himalayas range. A recent study found that the Himalayan glaciers in this region melted 65% faster in 2011-2020 than in the previous decade. This shows a big change in how glaciers are behaving.
Closer to Everest, the Khumbu Glaciers are thinning steadily. A study of six decades of glacier changes around the mountain found that ice loss has been increasing since the early 1960s. Glaciers have thinned by more than 100 meters.
This affects mountaineers who use the Khumbu Icefall to reach Mount Everest and nearby peaks like Lhotse and Nuptse.
The Most Dangerous Passage
The Khumbu Icefall is the fastest-moving part of the 15km-long Khumbu Glacier. It is full of crevasses and towering seracs. “The Khumbu Icefall doesn’t stay in one place after the ice breaks down. It is not stable,” Kaji Sherpa tells Dialogue Earth. “When huge pieces of ice break, crevasses are made. Due to icefall, accidents happen on the route.”
A supraglacial lake on the Khumbu Glacier, located right next to South Base Camp. Credit: Ridhi Agrawal via Dialogue Earth.
The spring climbing season of 2014 was one of the deadliest. An avalanche in the icefall killed 16 Sherpas. This stopped the climbing season. “With climate change, there are more chances of losing lives at the Khumbu Icefall,” Kaji Sherpa notes.
Warming temperatures are also changing the glacier’s surface. Researchers have seen supraglacial lakes forming. These lakes can act like “heatsinks, eating away the ice, and slowly merge to form larger proglacial lakes,” explains Tenzing Chogyal Sherpa, a cryosphere analyst. One such lake, Thyanbo, caused a glacial lake outburst flood last August. This flood severely damaged Thame Village in the Everest region.
This pattern of glacial lake expansion suggests that internal glacier temperatures are rising. A 2017 study found that the coldest ice in the Khumbu Glacier was two degrees Celsius warmer than the average annual air temperature. This means the ice inside the glacier was warmer than the air outside, says Chogyal Sherpa, who worked on the research.
“Glaciers are warming up from the inside and might be more vulnerable to even minor atmospheric warming,” he explains.
The New Route
The new route uses steel steps and fixed ropes. This offers a safer alternative to the unpredictable Khumbu Icefall. These features are already widely used in the Alps. They provide a solution to the dangers caused by climate change.
It offers “a solution to reduce the risk of fatal accidents and a solution to ensure sustainable and adaptive mountaineering tourism in the Everest region,” says Antoine Erout, a member of the expedition for the new route.
A member of the Nepali-French team drills holes into the rockface for permanent steel steps, part of the infrastructure they are installing. Credit: Marc Batard’s rope specialist team, via Dialogue Earth.
The route starts from Gorakshep, the last camp for meals on the existing route before South Base Camp. It goes up an old trail toward Sundar Peak, a path last used decades ago. This bypasses the Khumbu Icefall. It then reaches the ridge of Nuptse, before descending several hundred meters in the west valley of Everest to rejoin the normal route to Everest Camp 1 and the summit, says Theo Livet, an expedition member.
“There will be fixed ropes on the section for security, and some fixed ropes at points along the path where a fall could be dangerous,” Livet tells Dialogue Earth. These are used with a jumar, a portable handle clamped onto a rope, for extra safety. The route includes vertical climbing and trekking, offering some flexibility. “You can walk on the rocks; you don’t have to take the vertical climb,” Livet notes. He adds that the vertical climb helps porters carry supplies to higher camps more quickly.
Bypassing the Khumbu Icefall is crucial. The growing number of climbers could destabilize the ice on the existing Nepal route.
The new route avoids the Khumbu Icefall and goes via the Nuptse ridge to reach Everest Camp 1. Navigating over rock rather than ice, the aim is to use steps and fixed ropes to ensure safer passage for climbers. Credit: Marc Batard’s rope specialist team via Dialogue Earth.
“More foot traffic on the already unstable ice speeds up the compaction and cracking of the ice surface,” notes Mohan Bahadur Chand, a glaciologist. “This, along with waste left by climbers, speeds up the melting along the route. This leads to the weakening of fast-moving icefalls like Khumbu, which is currently accelerated by increased temperature and changes in precipitation patterns.”
However, the expedition to complete the route may be in danger. Last month, Batard announced on Facebook that the team could not finish the route during their latest trip due to lack of funding. He called on the Nepali government to finance the project. Talks are ongoing, with the hope of reaching an agreement.
Climate Change in the Himalayas
Sherpas interviewed by Dialogue Earth describe how the Khumbu Glacier has changed over the years.
“It is one of the busiest glaciers in the world,” says Chogyal Sherpa of the Khumbu Glacier. Many mountaineers, tourists, and workers live on it for over three months. “You won’t find such a high number of people living on a glacier for a long time anywhere else.”
Everest’s South Base Camp sits atop the Khumbu Glacier. It is the starting point for climbers attempting to summit the world’s highest peak from the Nepal side. The camp is busy for over three months of the year. This long human presence is affecting the stability of the glacier. Credit: Ridhi Agrawal via Dialogue Earth.
This long human presence is also affecting the glacier’s climate. “The unpredictability and extremity of weather events – unseasonal snowfall, no snow, heavy snow, too much rain, and sometimes no rain at all – is becoming more frequent,” explains Chogyal Sherpa.
“Snow on the mountains has been melting, exposing rocks,” adds Pasang Nuru Sherpa, who has been guiding the expedition for the new route. “This increases the risks of rock falls, putting lives in danger.”
Despite these dangers, Sherpas must continue working. “We have to raise our families and risk our lives,” he says.
Phurba Tsering Sherpa, a tea house owner on the South Base Camp trail, whose grandfather summited the mountain 10 times, says that working on Everest is a 50-50 chance between survival and death. These odds led Phu Chettar Sherpa to leave his job as an icefall doctor after seven years. He used to re-fix ropes at around 5,000 meters elevation each season due to the shifting of the Khumbu Icefall. “My family was unhappy with that kind of job because of safety concerns,” he says.
“Glaciers in general react very fast to variations in climate; the Khumbu Icefall is not an exception,” says Erout. He adds that “it has become much more hazardous and sensitive to global warming.”
The Future of Mountaineering
The UN declared 2025 the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. March 21 is World Glaciers Day. Few places show the urgency of glacier loss more clearly than the Khumbu Icefall. New crevasses and seracs form each season as the ice recedes.
“No profession is as close to glaciers as mountaineers,” Tenzing Chogyal Sherpa tells Dialogue Earth. “Mountaineers climb them, interact with them, and walk on the glaciers. They are at the forefront of the climate crisis. Their profession is at the mercy of the weather.”
Over the years, Chettar Sherpa, the former icefall doctor, has noticed troubling changes. He says that peaks like Island Peak and Lobuche Peak in Sagarmatha National Park now look more like black rocks, with little to no snowfall in winter.
Even the Nepali Everest trail is turning “more and more rocky” – especially near Crampon Point, where the Khumbu Icefall begins, he says. These changes increase the risk for climbers.
“Depending on how the Khumbu Icefall changes and the possibility of serious accidents with climbers, the new route could sooner or later become the normal route to Everest,” says Erout.
The broader impacts of climate change are also affecting local livelihoods.
In Lukla, the main gateway to the Everest region, the weather is very unpredictable. The airport’s operation depends on the weather, says Chogyal Sherpa. “Bad weather can lead to backlogs, causing cascading effects on bookings,” threatening the region’s tourism-dependent economy, he notes.
As climate change speeds up, bringing more erratic and extreme weather – and with it, rapid glacier thinning – the stakes are higher than just mountaineering. What’s at risk is the entire future of mountain life itself – its economies, communities, and ecosystems.
“Climbing is the primary income of the local people. Restricting climbing due to increased risk from climate change will directly affect them and the country’s overall tourism,” says Chand. He warns that there will be “ecological and cultural consequences in terms of water availability for local communities, agriculture, hydropower, and traditional life may be altered”.
Chand notes that reducing greenhouse gas emissions to pre-industrial levels globally is key to slowing down the effects of climate change on glaciers, snow, and permafrost. “We have no alternatives,” he says. “If ice melting continues, even a new route won’t be sustainable due to the increased risk in these highly fragile environments.”
