Our Planet Climate and Geopolitics
“A.C. Irvine” is sewn into a thick sock that has been found with a foot and a boot on the Rongbuk glacier under the north face of Everest. It’s believed to belong to the British climber Andrew Irvine, who died a hundred years ago while attempting the first ascent of the mountain.
The discovery was made by a National Geographic team, whose members think Irvine’s remains had been trapped in a glacier that melted just before they arrived on the scene. Irvine’s great niece and biographer said the revelation marked something “close to closure”.
But we still don’t have an answer to the ultimate mountaineering mystery: did Irvine and his climbing partner George Mallory reach the top? If they did, this would have been 29 years before the first official summit in 1953.
The 22-year-old Irvine was thought to have been carrying a Kodak Pocket camera, which could provide definitive evidence either way. But that’s still somewhere on the mountain, possibly nearby.