It's the tallest mountain in the world.

The big questions this expedition is answering is how climate change is happening in the high mountain regions.

Can you maps are critical tool for being able to measure the changes in the glacial extent way came over the crest of the hill and took a look at his camp the first time.

I was like, Oh, my God, I can't believe we're gonna be trying to map there.

Yeah, Mount Everest has been on the map since the mid 19th century, but it wasn't until about the 19 twenties when the British first started sending expeditions to the north side of Mount Everest through Tibet that we got large scale detailed mapping.

They were doing all their serving using photographs and telescopic instruments to tie things together on a topographic map.

The transition from maps as paper products, thio maps as digital products has changed the way we work with geographic data.

We're going to reconstruct how the glaciers have changed with the increased warming of the climate in this part of the world.

So at this angle, are we gonna have correct?

Yeah.

Whoa, Crazy.

That's big one of the Minneapolis, which is every day.

True, people understand Everest as this big, beautiful mountain with a huge glacier running down it.

If that glacier is gone, that's something that can't be brought back As the glaciers melt, there's an initial increase in the amount of water available and then eventually a decrease in the amount of water available to the rivers that come out of High Mountain Asia.

Hundreds of millions of people are gonna be affected downstream the Khumbu Glacier, the highest pleasure in the world, which starts at about 80 m on Mount Everest and what's called the accumulation zone.

It's where all the snow falls and starts compressing into ice and flowing downhill base camp.

It's a launching point for expeditions and climbers that are intending to summit Mt.

Everest.

We wanted to map the full extent of that to capture the physical information, but also to better understand how climate is modifying the glacier.

The work that Chris and I are doing here at base camp will be the most detailed map of the Khumbu Glacier that's ever been put together through the equipment that Chris and I are using is a very recently developed terrestrial based slide.

Our system, we're combining that with our helicopter based a lot are scanning using ah, very advanced device from virtual wonders are partners on the helicopter scan.

The tools that we use for the terrestrial mapping are really threefold.

We're using lidar, which is a laser scanning tool.

It shoots out two million points per second, taking individual measurements in a 360 degrees fear and measures everything that it can see.

If you do that enough places you build an overall topographical model of whatever it is you're scanning.

Base camp is about three kilometers from one end to the other and a couple 100 m wide took us many stations to be able to collect all the data that we needed for all the tent areas and the glacial areas that air used for base camp.

Once you create a three D model, you then need to what's called skin the model with very detailed imagery.

We take pictures using DSLR photography.

We're gonna take high resolution images to paste onto those measurements that the laser scanning provides.

So right now I'm taking three frames at a time to stop exposure bracket.

We have bright, bright snow and really dark shadows way need to be able to capture all of that information if we were to lose highlights or lose shadows when we're building that environment that the model is gonna go into, we just don't have that data were never capturing it again.

All right, so we're doing our first overview pass with drone.

So flying at about 50 m, it'll fill any gaps that we might miss with a light are and with ground based photographic work, this is a really difficult environment.

Drones really help us give the overall perspective on every space camp.

And the last thing that we're doing is taking a helicopter and attaching the light, our system and a video camera and flying it up and down the Khumbu integrated pattern so that they can create a map of a much greater scale.

The combination on the helicopter of the very advanced lied are and the photo Graham a tree will allow us to provide very detailed imagery on the surface of the model.

Once we're back in the lab, we can see all the different light our data collected.

In one view, we've done a very, very detailed map of the Khumbu Glacier.

This is base camp.

The entirety of what you're seeing here is computer generated.

Once you get the full resolution of photography, it's gonna be a virtual reality experience as if you were there looking at the tents at base camp.

So if we take our three d model weaken, dive into it and start looking Atmore and more of the detail that's captured by the point cloud, What we're gonna be able to do is take this data and reconstruct how the glaciers have changed.

One of the things that you could notice the Khumbu Glacier has receded.

It's probably dropped tens of meters in its elevation.

So its head of ice loss that's really pronounced for such a short time period.

This is a global issue that's gonna have global ramifications.

Every person in the world will be affected by this.

One of the goals is to not just generate new science, but have the chance to build on the legacy of mapping this area, to instill in people how important climate changes and to start working on addressing it now for a successful future.