The dangers of climbing Mount Everest are not limited to freezing temperatures and altitude sickness. According to Taiwan’s United Evening News on May 14, experts have discovered that the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest, is actually a high-radiation environment.
According to the report, Bob Kerr, a 36-year-old Scottish radiation expert, summited the mountain in May 2013 with the help of a guide and conducted measurements, discovering that the Everest summit has high levels of radiation from cosmic rays. Climbers are exposed to a radiation dose of 1 millisievert (mSv), which is five times the average annual radiation dose of someone working at a nuclear power plant.
The report said that Kerr climbed Everest intending to measure radiation, but he had to stop at an altitude of 7,925 meters due to temporary blindness in his right eye caused by oxygen deprivation. His Nepali guide, Kattel, continued upward with the equipment, reaching an altitude of 8,839 meters, where he used a Geiger counter to detect radiation and found that the levels were unusually high.
Kerr told the Society for Radiological Protection that the high radiation levels on Everest come from space-based cosmic rays. Although the radiation is high, no climbers have ever died as a result. The risk of developing cancer and dying from exposure to such high-altitude radiation is also very low, estimated at just one in 10,000.
According to the report, Kerr pointed out that if someone were to absorb the same amount of radiation at ground level—but not from cosmic rays—they would be classified under the UK’s 1999 Ionising Radiations Regulations as having received a “significant dose,” reaching the upper limit of the regulated annual allowance.
Kerr said, “When I talk to climbers about my career in radiation protection, I find that although they are happy to climb Everest, they also share the public’s fear of radiation. They don’t realize that when they ascend into the sky, the natural background radiation from space also increases.”