The snow thickness on the top of Mount Everest is 9.5 ± 1.2 meters! Far surpassing previous reports on snow cover | Mount Everest | Report
The reporter learned from the second Qinghai Tibet scientific expedition team that the latest snow thickness at the top of Mount Everest measured by the radar profile measurement method was 9.5 ± 1.2 meters, providing valuable reference data for studying the dynamic changes of the cryosphere and the lithosphere at the top of Mount Everest at extremely high altitudes.
Academician Yao Tandong, the leader of the second Tibetan scientific expedition and honorary director of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said, "This discovery not only reveals the thickness of snow on the top of Mount Everest, but also opens a new direction for further understanding of climate change at very high altitude."
The thickness of snow on the top of Mount Everest directly affects its bare height. At the same time, with global climate change, the snow thickness and its changes at the top of Mount Everest have important scientific value in understanding the response of the cryosphere to climate change, and have always been of concern to the scientific community and the public.
Over the past 50 years, there have been multiple reports on the snow thickness at the top of Mount Everest. However, due to issues with measurement methods and methods, the reported data is highly uncertain and controversial. In 1975, the Chinese mountaineering team estimated a thickness of about 0.92 meters by inserting wooden poles into the snow layer. In 1992, the Chinese Italian joint mountaineering team measured a snow depth of 2.55 meters using iron poles. In 2005, the Chinese mountaineering team estimated a snow thickness of about 3.5 meters using radar measurements. In 2019, the Nepalese mountaineering team and 2020, the Chinese mountaineering team used radar measurements to measure the snow thickness at the top of Mount Everest, but there were no relevant measurement results reported.
From April to May 2022, the second Qinghai Tibet scientific expedition team conducted a comprehensive scientific investigation and research on the extremely high altitude areas of Mount Everest. One important scientific expedition task was to measure the snow thickness and structure at the top of Mount Everest. The scientific expedition team used a 1000MHz integrated ice and snow thickness measurement radar to start measuring along the exposed bedrock at the top of Mount Everest, gradually measuring up to the top of Mount Everest. Yang Wei, a researcher from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the direct director of the Everest radar thickness measurement project, said: "Compared with the previous top single point radar measurement method, this profile measurement method can ensure that the snow bed rock radar reflection interface presents a gradual trend, which is easy to correctly interpret the later data." The radar measurement results show that the snow thickness on the top of Everest is far greater than the previously reported results, and the snow thickness on the top of Everest in May 2022 is 9.5 ± 1.2 meters.