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Thomas Mathews (born November 28, 1958) is an American actor best known for his role as Tommy Jarvis in the Friday the 13th franchise —in particular Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)—and Freddy in The Return of the Living Dead (1985).
Mar 25, 2021 · Tom Matthews studies the impacts of climate change on extreme weather events and mountain systems. He led expeditions to Mount Everest in 2019 and 2022 to install weather stations and map the limits of Earth's climate envelope.
- Overview
- A new window on the planet
- Bad news for the Himalaya
- Extreme drills and indestructible tripods
- Forecasts and frozen fingers
- In search of ancient ice
- Saved by a shovel handle and duct tape
- The lab work begins
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Sherpas and scientists faced extreme weather and record crowds as they struggled to install a crucial network of weather sensors.
Climate scientists Baker Perry and Tom Matthews, along with a team of Sherpas, build an automatic weather station at the Balcony on Mount Everest. The station, sitting at 27,600 feet above sea level, is the highest ever installed—reaching the Sub-tropical Jet Stream, a band of powerful winds that circle the globe at high altitudes and are notoriously difficult to track.
This article was supported by Rolex, which is partnering with the National Geographic Society on science-based expeditions to explore, study, and document change in the planet's most unique regions. A version of this story appears in the July 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine.
Everest Base Camp, Nepal—Just after dawn on May 23, 2019, two climate scientists, Tom Matthews and Baker Perry, stood on the Southeast Ridge of Mount Everest at 27,650 feet, on the verge of making history. They had spent months preparing for this moment: the installation of the highest weather station in the world.
Their team had worked closely with a crew of engineers to meticulously construct the seven-foot-tall, 110-pound structure to withstand the extreme cold and hurricane-force winds it would face on the highest point of the planet. They had tested it in New Hampshire and Nepal, and then had painstakingly practiced erecting it as quickly and efficiently as possible with their team of six Sherpa. They knew that the lack of oxygen and effects of exhaustion would give them a maximum of three or four hours to get the station up and working before they had to descend.
Now, with the sun beginning to rise over the Tibetan plateau, everything seemed to be coming together. Even the season’s notoriously fickle weather was cooperating. But as Matthews and Perry unpacked their gear, a terrible truth began to sink in: a key piece was missing.
Matthews and Perry had come to Everest as part of an ambitious scientific assessment of the mountain. The National Geographic Society, working in partnership with Tribhuvan University, the Government of Nepal, and funded by Rolex, launched the two-month expedition, which ultimately involved more than 30 scientists conducting fieldwork at various elevations on the mountain as well as across the rugged Khumbu Valley.
“This is a new window into the planet,” said Paul Mayewski, director of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine and the expedition's scientific leader. “We believe the best way to do science on Everest isn’t just to do one kind of science, but do many kinds of science.”
The multi-disciplinary group included geologists, glaciologists, biologists, cartographers, and climate scientists, who set out to collect hundreds of water, snow, and rock samples as well as install sensors to record vegetation growth, and survey the landscape using high-resolution laser technology.
While the bulk of the team’s work would happen at base camp or lower elevations, Mayewski had challenged Matthews, Perry, and climate scientist Mariusz Potocki to climb to the summit for scientific purposes. Aided by a strong support team of Sherpa, the group hoped to install weather stations and drill ice cores at both the South Col and the summit. The two weather stations (part of a network of six the team would establish on and around the mountain) would be the world's highest.
The herculean task of conducting field science at 29,035 feet demanded months of preparation and planning. Specialized equipment needed to be designed, built, and tested, while the team trained for the rigors of not only climbing the world's tallest mountain, but also the physical effort required to set up the weather stations and drill the cores.
“No one's ever done field science above 7,000 meters,” Mayewski said simply. “Everything is very different up there.”
“Climate change operates differently in different parts of the world,” Paul Mayewski told me one afternoon as he sat in the communications tent at base camp on the Khumbu Glacier. It was the third week in May, and snow flurries drifted among the moraine crests outside, softly padding the tent’s orange and black fabric. A bearded 72-year-old with youthful features and unkempt, silver hair, Mayewski spoke in no-nonsense bursts.
“This is one of the faster warming continental regions in the world, but we don’t know what’s really going on above 5,000 meters,” he continued, “and these mountains are the water towers of the planet. Between 20-25 percent of the world’s population gets their water from the Himalaya.”
Three months earlier, in February 2019, the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development released the Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment, a landmark report five years in the making. Collecting and analyzing data from 350 researchers and policy experts, the study forecast what is likely to happen to the Greater Himalaya, and its inhabitants over the next 80 years as the Earth continues to warm.
Even if the global community met the most ambitious carbon-reduction goals laid out by the Paris Agreement, the report warned, one-third of the region’s approximately 10,000 glaciers will be gone by the end of the century. For the 250 million people who live across the mountain region—and the 1.6 billion people who depend on the water which flows from it—the report spelled out an enormous cataclysm that many will witness in their lifetimes.
“As we begin to put together a better understanding of what the future will be like, understanding what is happening between 5,000—8,800 meters will become extremely important,” Mayewski explained. Virtually all the glaciers in the Himalaya originate in snow deposit zones above 5,000 meters, meaning that scientists can’t put together an accurate picture of how fast the region's glaciers are melting until they venture above 5,000 meters to understand the environment where glaciers are being formed.
“We will have just that much better understanding of how the hydrosphere—the water system—will react with increased change,” Mayewski continued. “How the winds will change and where the jet stream is. It’s critical throughout the northern hemisphere.”
Conducting “meaningful field science,” as Mayewski put it, in the environment above 8,000 meters presents several uniquely daunting challenges.
At extreme altitudes, a mountaineer's fine motor control and high-level decision making are frequently impaired. Erecting a weather station or drilling a 10-meter ice core are both activities that require several hours of rigorous effort under the best conditions. On the upper reaches of Everest, one must work wearing both an oxygen mask and mittens, or risk disorientation and frostbite.
Then there's the not insignificant logistical matter of ensuring that all the necessary equipment is transported up the mountain and all the ice samples are moved safely down and then remain frozen as they are taken from Nepal to the U.S. and deposited in the custom-built freezers at the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute.
“Mountaineers are just hoping to summit, take a few selfies, and then get down as quickly as possible,” explained Pete Athans, a seven-time Everest summiteer and the climbing leader of the team. “This is like stopping on the summit and trying to assemble a car.”
To design and install a series of automated weather stations at various altitudes, Mayewski recruited Baker Perry, a tall, taciturn climate scientist from Appalachian State University, who once played professional basketball in Bolivia, and Tom Matthews, a quick-talking English climatologist and avid marathoner from Loughborough University.
“You can’t really make a bulletproof station,” Perry told me. “Especially with solar panels and radiation shields, you’re limited by the sensors that are available.” An Italian research team installed a weather station at the South Col a decade ago, only to have it shredded by small stones picked up by the wind and blasted like shrapnel into the equipment. Perry and Matthews ultimately partnered with the design team at Campbell Scientific to help them engineer and build six weather stations.
When the team arrived at base camp in mid-April, they joined a record number of mountaineers hoping to cross off the world’s highest peak from their bucket lists. According to Everest blogger Alan Arnette, Nepal's Ministry of Tourism issued 382 climbing permits and 390 support permits for a total of 772 people attempting to get to the summit during the 2019 spring season, which generally lasts until around the end of May.
Furthermore, all of these climbers would be closely watching the erratic weather, looking to time their summit attempts for the few days each season when the winds abate and the skies clear. With so many climbers, the route to the top could create dangerous traffic jams high on the mountain and potentially lead to tragedy.
Prolonged good weather was especially crucial for Perry and Matthews to put up the weather station and for Potocki’s ice core drilling. Not only did they need enough good weather to safely reach the summit—and get down—but also to spend several hours working there. Ultimately, weather and crowd behavior would determine much of the team’s chances for success.
“There’s limited space close to the summit to actually do things, even with oxygen,” Mayewski explained. “We need space to work. It would only take one person—not even in our group—to completely derail that.”
“You have to avoid self-inflected wounds on crowded days, like taking too long and running out of oxygen,” Athans said, “or you could end up getting involved in rescuing someone else and run out of oxygen.”
By May 19, with the traditional summit window at hand, the weather forecasts remained iffy. But the models predicted the winds would subside in a couple days, so Matthews, Perry, Potocki, and their team of climbing Sherpa led by Panuru packed up and departed base camp for the three day climb to the South Col.
Potocki’s first target was a small remnant glacier clinging to the north side of the South Col. It’s the first stretch of ice encountered when leaving camp 4 bound for the summit. Mountaineers regard it as a moderate obstacle, but to Potocki it represented scientific gold—ancient, undisturbed, relatively clean ice.
As soon as the drill bit into the ice, Potocki, broke into a smile. The exceptionally cold, dry conditions at 8,020 meters made for brittle ice chips, which cleared easily around the barrel of the drill, ensuring a clean core. “I knew it would be very enjoyable drilling,” he said with a laugh. “You know from experience how the drill behaves.”
The team steadily removed approximately 50-centimeter lengths of core at time, packaging each sample in a white cardboard poster tube and adding extensions to the drill as the hole grew deeper. As they drilled, Matthews and Perry and a contingent of six Sherpa were busy erecting the weather station on the other side of the Col.
By early afternoon, the ice coring team had returned to camp, having drilled a 10-meter section of ice.
Back in his tent but too jazzed to rest, Potocki realized that a second core, taken from ice at the foot of the glacier, would provide a full picture of the glacier’s age, which he and Mayewski estimated could be 5,000 to 10,000 years old. “I said, ‘oh no, I will not leave it that easy; I want more ice,’” Potocki recalled.
He returned to the glacier to take a second core. “I went 2.2 meters, down to bedrock,” he says. “Now we have the top and the bottom of the glacier, so we can determine how old the glacier is and see accumulation rates.”
As Perry, Matthews, Potocki, and their team of Sherpa left the South Col, a high deck of clouds passed over the mountain, and it began to snow intermittently, casting everything in a chalky darkness.
“We made good progress off the bat, but then we hit the back of the line,” Perry said. A line of dozens of mountaineers, some of whom had left Camp 4 as early as 5 p.m., had come to a near standstill at a part of the route known as the Triangle Face.
“It wasn’t totally unexpected. We had seen some of this in the icefall and going up the Lhotse Face,” Perry reflected. “But it was frustrating for the Sherpa team because we couldn’t all just unclip and zip past these people. The slower you move, the colder you get.”
After two hours of stop-and-go traffic, the team reached the Balcony—a flat section where the climbing route intersects with the crest of the Southeast Ridge.
“We saw the line of people ahead of us,” Perry said, “and realized what we were up against. When we moved to May 23rd, that just put us in the middle of two very busy summit days.”
“You're trying to maximize your team's advantages by going on the best summit day,” Pete Athans explained. “The strong irony is everyone else is trying to do the same thing.”
While the group made their way back to base camp, the weather stations were already transmitting data to a National Geographic Society computer server.
Potocki's ice cores were helicoptered from camp 2 to Kathmandu, where they went into storage in the deep freezer unit at the American Club. They will soon be flown to the U.S. and driven in a specially chartered freezer truck from the customs office at John F. Kennedy International Airport to the Climate Change Institute in Maine.
It will take months before the true scope of the fieldwork is understood.
Despite the overcrowded, high-stakes environment on Everest, all three scientists see reason to return. “It would be worth going back with radar to learn more about this glacier and to drill all the way to the bottom,” Potocki said. “But my wife said she'd divorce me.”
Tom Matthews is one of the two climate scientists who installed the world's highest weather station on Mount Everest in 2019. The station aims to study the Sub-tropical Jet Stream, a band of powerful winds that circle the globe at high altitudes.
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Dr Tom Matthews is a senior lecturer in environmental geography who specializes in glacier-climate interactions and extreme weather events. He has worked on projects in the Himalaya, Europe, and South Asia, and teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on climate change and modelling.
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The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance. C Raymond, T Matthews, RM Horton. Science Advances 6 (19), eaaw1838. , 2020. 464. 2020. Communicating the deadly consequences of global warming for human heat stress. TKR Matthews, RL Wilby, C Murphy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (15), 3861-3866.
