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Everest Mountain
The American Geophysical Union’s Eos News Blog posted that Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world, but it sometimes appears to be the second highest mountain, and a recent study found that air pressure on the mountain fluctuates dramatically during all year round, causing a decrease in “height. The remarkable” summit “is sometimes below the level of its lowest competitor, K2, the second highest mountain in the world.
“Sometimes K2 is higher than Everest,” lead author Tom Matthews, a climate scientist at Loughborough University in the UK, told Eos.
In the new study, published Dec. 18 in the journal iScience, Matthews and his colleagues looked at more than 40 years of atmospheric pressure data recorded by weather stations near the top of Mount Everest and the European Space Agency’s Copernicus satellite. .
Air pressure is closely related to the availability of oxygen on Everest – when air pressure drops, the number of oxygen molecules in the air drops, making the simple process of breathing difficult, according to the Eos website.
For this reason, many of those who choose to hike Mount Everest rely on supplemental oxygen while traveling to higher altitudes where the air is thinner. (The study authors note that only 169 men and eight women climbed Everest without using supplemental oxygen.)
The study authors found that while air pressure reliably decreases with altitude, it also fluctuates with weather.
From 1979 to 2019, air pressure near the top of Everest ranged from 309 to 343 hectopascals (barometer), about a third of the pressure at sea level, depending on the season.
“Compared to the mean atmospheric pressure measured at the top of Everest in May, this extension translates into a difference of 737 meters (2,417 feet) in the height of the summit from the point of view of oxygen availability,” he wrote science journalist Kathryn Corney on the blog.
In other words, the availability of oxygen on Mount Everest sometimes makes the mountain thousands of feet shorter than it actually is. Every now and then, the 29,000-foot (8,800 m) mountain seems shorter (to our bodies) than the world’s second highest mountain, K2, which is 28,250 feet (8,600 meters) high.
The researchers also found that the air pressure on Mount Everest was always at its highest in the summer, making it the best climbing season based solely on oxygen availability. The researchers also concluded that as Earth’s atmosphere continues to warm due to climate change, there may be a permanent decrease in the perceived height of the mountain, according to “Life Science.”
