History could be made atop Everest
In today’s newsletter, meet the Black climbers preparing a historic summit of Everest, see the junkyard that transformed into a national park, learn about the bat that set a migration record, and understand why fruits and vegetables are losing their potency.
By Starlight Williams
At least 4,000 people have summited Mount Everest—at 29,032 feet it’s the world’s tallest mountain—since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first reached the peak in 1953. But only 10 of those climbers were Black.
The Full Circle Everest Expedition team (pictured above), composed entirely of Black climbers, plans to double that number during the 2022 climbing season. It wasn’t until 2003 that South African Sibusiso Vilane became the first Black man to summit. Three years later, Sophia Danenberg became the first and only Black American and Black woman to do so, an event that went practically unnoticed at the time.
So far, an all-Black expedition team has yet to summit the peak known in Tibetan as Chomolungma, or “Goddess Mother of the World.” This groundbreaking climbing team hopes its success will change the perception of mountaineering and persuade more Black people to embrace wilderness adventures. Now, the team is waiting at Everest Base Camp in Nepal (pictured below) for the right weather conditions to summit and make history.
Read the full story here.
Please consider supporting our storytelling by subscribing here. Thanks!
SMARTER PLANET
Rescued: The lovely wetland above was once a toxic junkyard. It’s now, after a long, expensive cleanup, part of a 200-acre addition to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio. The cleanup—and transformation—is just one of more than a dozen being worked on in the U.S. National Parks system. Previous work cleaned up a uranium mine on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, and arsenic and copper extraction sites in California’s Joshua Tree National Park, Nat Geo reports.
STORIES WE’RE FOLLOWING
• As drought worsens, can Kenyan communities coexist with native wildlife?
• Fruits and vegetables are losing their potency
• Tiny bat makes record-shattering flight with 1500-mile migration
• Going undercover to save manta rays
• Pirate tales: Why our knowledge of Captain Kidd and Bluebeard is more fantasy than fact
PHOTO OF THE DAY
May flowers: After April showers, the flowers arrive. So does the pollen. In the photo above, a woman in Nagano Prefecture, Japan, pollinates pear blossoms by hand. This picture originally appeared in an October 1984 story—and was recently chosen for our Photo of the Day archival collection. For some plants, getting pollen is a struggle, Nat Geo reports.
IN A FEW WORDS
Barriers are entirely in your mind, and you can choose to accept those barriers, or you can have the guts to dance, to tango with the unknown, to take that first step and see what unfolds.Albert Lin, Engineer, archaeologist, Nat Geo Explorer
FUTURE FORWARD
There’s little time left: Nations have to move fast to reduce carbon emissions—or we could face a “mass extinction” of ocean species. Moving quickly, researchers note, would slow the warming of waters and the oxygen loss at sea. That loss threatens to erase much of the species diversification that has occurred since the end-Cretaceous extinction that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Read Craig Welch’s report. (Pictured above, a sea turtle above coral in the western Philippines.)
