Last Surviving Member of 1st Team to Conquer Mount Everest Says it is Crowded, Dirty Now

Kanchha Sherpa sits on a chair during an interview with The Associated Press at his residence in Kathmandu, Nepal, Saturday, March 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)
Kanchha Sherpa sits on a chair during an interview with The Associated Press at his residence in Kathmandu, Nepal, Saturday, March 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)
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Last Surviving Member of 1st Team to Conquer Mount Everest Says it is Crowded, Dirty Now

Kanchha Sherpa sits on a chair during an interview with The Associated Press at his residence in Kathmandu, Nepal, Saturday, March 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)
Kanchha Sherpa sits on a chair during an interview with The Associated Press at his residence in Kathmandu, Nepal, Saturday, March 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

The only surviving member of the mountaineering expedition that first conquered Mount Everest said Saturday that the world's highest peak is too crowded and dirty, and the mountain is a god that needs to be respected.
Kanchha Sherpa, 91, was among the 35 members in the team that put New Zealander Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay atop the 8,849-meter (29,032-foot) peak on May 29, 1953.
“It would be better for the mountain to reduce the number of climbers,” Kanchha said in an interview in Kathmandu on Saturday, “Right now there is always a big crowd of people at the summit.”
Since the first conquest, the peak has been climbed thousands of times, and it gets more crowded every year. During the spring climbing season in 2023, 667 climbers scaled the peak, but that brought in thousands of support staff to the base camp between the months of March and May.
There have been concerns about the number of people living on the mountain for months on end, generating trash and waste, but authorities have no plans to cut down on the number of permits they issue to climbers.
There are rules that require climbers to bring down their own trash, equipment and everything they carry to the mountain or risk losing their deposit, but monitoring has not been very effective, The Associated Press reported.
“It is very dirty now. People throw tins and wrappings after eating food. Who is going to pick them up now?” Kanchha said. “Some climbers just dump their trash in the crevasse, which would be hidden at that time but eventually it will flow down to base camp as the snow melts and carries them downward.”
For the Sherpas, Everest is Qomolangma or goddess mother of the world, and is revered by their community. They generally perform religious rituals before climbing the peak.
“They should not be dirtying the mountain. It is our biggest god and they should not be dirtying the gods,” he said “Qomolangma is the biggest god for the Sherpas but people smoke and eat meat and throw them on the mountain.”
Kanchha was just a young man when he joined the Hillary-Tenzing expedition. He was among the three Sherpas to go the last camp on Everest along with Hillary and Tenzing. They could not go any further because they did not have a permit.
They first heard of the successful ascent on the radio, and then were reunited with the summit duo at Camp 2.
“We all gathered at Camp 2 but there was no alcohol so we celebrated with tea and snacks,” he said. “We then collected whatever we could and carried it to base camp.”
The route they opened up from the base camp to the summit is still used by climbers. Only the section from the base camp to Camp 1 over the unstable Khumbu Icefall changes every year.
Kanchha has four children, eight grandchildren and a 20-month-old great-granddaughter.



Alien Planet Lashed by Huge Flares from its 'Angry Beast' Star

File Photo: An imagined view of the three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth discovered using a specialist telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatoryin Chile. ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger
File Photo: An imagined view of the three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth discovered using a specialist telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatoryin Chile. ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger
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Alien Planet Lashed by Huge Flares from its 'Angry Beast' Star

File Photo: An imagined view of the three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth discovered using a specialist telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatoryin Chile. ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger
File Photo: An imagined view of the three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth discovered using a specialist telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatoryin Chile. ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger

Scientists are tracking a large gas planet experiencing quite a quandary as it orbits extremely close to a young star - a predicament never previously observed.

This exoplanet, as planets beyond our solar system are called, orbits its star so tightly that it appears to trigger flares from the stellar surface - larger than any observed from the sun - reaching several million miles (km) into space that over time may strip much of this unlucky world's atmosphere, Reuters reported.

The phenomenon appears to be caused by the planet's interaction with the star's magnetic field, according to the researchers. And this star is a kind known to flare, especially when young.

"A young star of this type is an angry beast, especially if you're sitting as close up as this planet does," said Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy astrophysicist Ekaterina Ilin, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.

The star, called HIP 67522, is slightly more massive than the sun and is located about 407 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

This star and planet, as well as a second smaller gas planet also detected in this planetary system, are practically newborns. Whereas the sun and our solar system's planets are roughly 4.5 billion years old, this star is about 17 million years old, with its planets slightly younger.

The planet, named HIP 67522 b, has a diameter almost the size of Jupiter, our solar system's largest planet, but with only 5% of Jupiter's mass. That makes it one of the puffiest exoplanets known, with a consistency reminiscent of cotton candy (candy floss).

It orbits five times closer to its star than our solar system's innermost planet Mercury orbits the sun, needing only seven days to complete an orbit.

A flare is an intense eruption of electromagnetic radiation emanating from the outermost part of a star's atmosphere, called the corona. So how does HIP 67522 b elicit huge flares from the star? As it orbits, it apparently interacts with the star's magnetic field - either through its own magnetic field or perhaps through the presence of conducting material such as iron in the planet's composition.

"We don't know for sure what the mechanism is. We think it is plausible that the planet moves within the star's magnetic field and whips up a wave that travels along magnetic field lines to the star. When the wave reaches the stellar corona, it triggers flares in large magnetic field loops that store energy, which is released by the wave," Ilin said.

"As it moves through the field like a boat on a lake, it creates waves in its wake," Ilin added. "The flares these waves trigger when they crash into the star are a new phenomenon. This is important because it had never been observed before, especially at the intensity detected."

The researchers believe it is a specific type of wave called an Alfvén wave, named for 20th century Swedish physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Hannes Alfvén, that propagates due to the interaction of magnetic fields.

The flares may heat up and inflate the planet's atmosphere, which is dominated by hydrogen and helium. Being lashed by these flares could blast away lighter elements from the atmosphere and reduce the planet's mass over perhaps hundreds of millions of years.

"At that time, it will have lost most if not all the light elements, and become what's called a sub-Neptune - a gas planet smaller than Neptune," Ilin said, referring to the smallest of our solar system's gas planets.

The researchers used observations by two space telescopes: NASA's TESS, short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, and the European Space Agency's CHEOPS, short for CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite.

The plight of HIP 67522 b illustrates the many circumstances under which exoplanets exist.

"It is certainly no sheltered youth for this planet. But I am not sad about it. I enjoy diversity in all things nature, and what this planet will eventually become - perhaps a sub-Neptune rich in heavy elements that did not evaporate - is no less fascinating than what we observe today."