Everest Climbers To Bring Poop Down With Them As Mountain Starts To Stink

Flying Squid@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 464 points –
Everest Climbers To Bring Poop Down With Them As Mountain Starts To Stink
iflscience.com
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How much frozen human shit has that mountain accumulated since people started climbing it for fun? Can somebody do the math on that? I feel like it has potential for a really shitty trivia question. Like, for Shitty Jeopardy! or something. JFC, I am baked.

@FlyingSquid omg I didn't realize it was your post. Hi! Ok I'm gonna put the bowl down

A shitload har har har

Apparently the average UK adult defecates about 100g per day, and that's the first link that showed up so I'm going to go with the UK numbers in that one study. According to wikipedia there were 11,346 ascents as of July 2022. Assuming two weeks from base camp to summit and back, based on Tom Kilpatrick's article on The Manual, that means 1.4 kg of shit per climb for a total of almost 16 metric tonnes or 17.5 short tons

That number is definitely low, you eat more in the cold and with exertion. It is probably over double your number, that is a lot of doo-doo.

I imagine all the loss of snow is exposing decades of accumulated mountain dookie.

By 2100 they are estimating a 75% loss of snow/ice on the mountain, which means at 800 climbs per year(modern rate) by 2100 there will be over 186 metric tonnes of poopy on the mountain with very little snow to hide it. I don't even think that number includes Sherpa scat.