公峰英文,珠穆朗玛峰英语音标( 二 ) _生活百科

Precipitation falls mostly during the monsoon season, while winter storms between December and March account for the rest. Unexpected storms, however, can drop up to 3 m (10 ft) of snow on unsuspecting climbers and mountain hikers.
Base Camp, which serves as a resting area and base of operations for climbers organizing their attempts for the summit, is located on the Khumbu glacier at an elevation of 5,400 m (17,600 ft); it receives an average of 450 mm (18 in) of precipitation a year.
Traditionally, the people who live near Mount Everest have revered the mountains of the Himalayas and imagined them as the homes of the gods. Because the peaks were considered sacred, no local people scaled them before the early 1900s. However, when foreign expeditions brought tourist dollars and Western ideas to the area, people of the Sherpa ethnic group began to serve as high-altitude porters for them. Because Nepal had been closed to foreigners since the early 1800s, all pre-World War II (1939-1945) Everest expeditions were forced to recruit Sherpa porters from Dārjiling (Darjeeling), India, then circle through Tibet and approach Everest from the north.
In 1913 British explorer John Noel sneaked into Tibet, which was also closed at the time, and made a preliminary survey of the mountain’s northern approaches, where the topography is less varied than on the southern side. In 1921 the British began a major exploration of the north side of the mountain, led by George Leigh Mallory. Mallory’s expedition, and another that took place soon afterward, were unable to overcome strong winds, avalanches, and other hazards to reach the summit. In 1924 a third British expedition resulted in the disappearance of Mallory and a climbing companion only 240 m (800 ft) from the summit. More attempts were made throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. Then, with the conquest of Tibet by China in the early 1950s, the region was closed to foreigners again and the northern approaches to the mountain were sealed off.
In 1950, the year after Nepal opened to foreigners, W. H. Tilman and C. Houston made the first ascent from the south and became the first people to see into the Khumbu cirque (a steep basin at the head of a mountain valley). A number of attempts to reach the mountain’s summit followed in the early 1950s. In 1952 the Swiss almost succeeded in climbing the mountain from the South Col, which is a major pass between the Everest and Lhotse peaks and is now the most popular climbing route to the summit. On May 29, 1953, under the tenth British expedition flag and the leadership of John Hunt, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay of Nepal successfully completed the first ascent of Mount Everest via the South Col. Several expeditions have since followed. In 1975 Junko Tabei of Japan became the first woman to summit Mount Everest. Later, in 1978, Austrians Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler established a new and rigorous standard by climbing to the summit without the use of supplemental oxygen, which, because of the thin air at Everest’s high altitude, is important for the energy, health, and thinking skills of the climbers. In 1991 Sherpas, who had carried the supplies for so many foreigners up Mount Everest, completed their own successful expedition to the summit. By the mid-1990s, 4,000 people had attempted to climb Everest—660 of them successfully reached the summit and more than 140 of them died trying.
The difficulties of climbing Mount Everest are legendary. Massive snow and ice avalanches are a constant threat to all expeditions. The avalanches thunder off the peaks repeatedly, sometimes burying valleys, glaciers, and climbing routes. Camps are chosen to avoid known avalanche paths, and climbers who make ascents through avalanche terrain try to cross at times when the weather is most appropriate. Hurricane-force winds are a well-known hazard on Everest, and many people have been endangered or killed when their tents collapsed or were ripped to shreds by the gales. Hypothermia, the dramatic loss of body heat, is also a major and debilitating problem in this region of high winds and low temperatures.