In the spring of 2019, Tracie Seimon would lie awake listening to the deep rumble of cracking ice. The glacier she was sleeping on at the base of Mount Everest was shifting beneath her tent.

Seimon, a molecular biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York City, spent three weeks trekking around that glacier. She hoped to create a snapshot of biodiversity in one of the planet’s most extreme environments—a mountain more than five miles high that’s prone to subzero temperatures, limited oxygen, and intense storms.

But despite its inhospitable nature, the world’s tallest peak is teeming with life. Seimon and her team found 16 percent of Earth’s taxonomic orders—a classification including families, genera, and