New Delhi: There are ominous signals coming out from the top of the world. Snow and snowstorms are common in winter at Mt Everest, but this year there was no snowfall in winter and there were snowstorms in spring, a BBC report says.
The snowstorms started after a completely dry winter, lasting from November to February. A particularly bad three-day snowstorm in April caught sherpas and mountaineers unawares.
Following the storm, an ice collapse on April 21 killed three sherpas and injured more than a dozen others in the Khumbu Ice Fall area. The mountaineering community is bewildered.
"We have never seen such snowfalls during spring," BBC quoted Manmohan Singh Chhetri of Asian Trekking, which had employed the sherpas, as saying.
Such accidents are common in mountaineering, but this one was blamed on the unusual snowfall, which was believed to have caused the ice mass to collapse.
"The accident had much to do with the sudden change in the weather patterns in the Everest region. Perhaps this is what global warming is all about", Chhetri said.
"The guidebooks I referred to did not have any information about snowfall in this season," Sarah Topping, a trekker from London, told BBC after she braved a sudden snowfall around Namche last month.
The unexpected snowfalls during spring have caught many trekkers unprepared, forcing some of them to return.
For 80-year-old Jangbu Sherpa, this is absolutely a new climatic happening, which makes him worried.
PAGE_BREAK
"This is something we've never seen before. We think this is quite ominous", remarked the 80-year-old from mountain town Namche, which is en route to the Everest base camp.
"Last winter was not at all like winter, and now the same is the case with spring," he said.
The locals are just as surprised. "I have taken all my jackets out of the wardrobes again, even though I had put them away last February," said Nawang Sherpa, a lodge owner in Namche.
The changing weather condition also has its bearing on the agricultural activity in the region.
"We were quite frustrated, because the wintry months were dry and we could not grow anything," said Sarki Maya Tamang, a farmer in Lukla, the gateway to the Everest region. "Now that it has snowed, the fields have become wet and we can sow barley."
This peculiar climatic change has caught the attention of organisations like World Wildlife Fund as well.
"We have noticed the unusual and unexpected snowfall in spring," WWF's climate change officer, Sandeep Chamling Rai said. "We have been receiving complaints from locals about the changing weather pattern."
Rangers in the Sagarmatha National Park viewed it as effect of world wide climatic change. "All we can say at this point is climate change is happening the world over and the Everest region cannot be an exception," said a spokesperson.
Comments
0 comment