Climbers Summit Mount Everest in Five Days Using Controversial Xenon Gas
The four British former special forces soldiers left the United Kingdom on May 16. By 7:10 a.m. on May 21, they were standing at the top of the 29,032-foot-tall peak
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Four British men have successfully completed a controversial high-speed expedition on Mount Everest, reaching the summit in just five days with help from xenon gas.
The climbers—who are all former special forces soldiers—left the United Kingdom on May 16. By 7:10 a.m. on May 21, they were standing on the top of the 29,032-foot-tall peak, according to Agence France-Presse.
Garth Miller, Alistair Carns, Anthony Stazicker and Kevin Godlington climbed the towering peak with help from the Austrian guiding company Furtenbach Adventures. The team also included five Sherpa guides and a cameraman.
Climbers who want to scale Everest typically must spend weeks or months acclimatizing to the altitude. But the team was able to complete the expedition, which doubled as a fundraiser for veterans, in a fraction of the normal time.
They pulled off the feat in part because they spent months preparing at home. They slept in hypoxic tents, or chambers with low oxygen levels meant to mimic the effects of high altitude, and exercised while wearing masks that restrict oxygen.
On May 5, they also inhaled xenon gas, reports the Washington Post’s Cindy Boren. After being lightly sedated at a clinic in Germany, the men breathed in a low dose of xenon gas mixed with oxygen for less than an hour.
It’s not clear what effect, if any, the xenon gas treatment had on the climbers. First discovered in the 1880s, the noble gas was long used as an anesthetic. Past research has found that it boosts the production of erythropoietin, a protein produced by the kidneys that helps increase the number of red blood cells in the body, typically in response to low oxygen levels. Erythropoietin also increases hemoglobin, which transports oxygen throughout the body.
Climbers attempting to summit Mount Everest carry portable oxygen tanks with them to help combat the low levels of oxygen present at such high elevations. The British men did this, too, but they also hoped the xenon treatment might give them an extra boost.
“It won’t be the deciding factor on this expedition, but it might provide us a percentage point increase at chance of success,” Carns, who is also the veterans minister in the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence, told the Washington Post before the trip.
But xenon gas is controversial in the mountaineering world. The World Anti-Doping Agency prohibits the manipulation of blood and blood components; it has also specifically banned xenon since 2014. But those rules don’t apply to high-altitude mountaineering, which has no governing body.
In a January statement, the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation argued there is “no evidence that breathing in xenon improves performance in the mountains, and inappropriate use can be dangerous.”
“According to the literature, the effects on performance are unclear and probably nonexistent,” the federation added.
In addition to its questionable effectiveness, some mountaineers oppose xenon gas because they see it as a shortcut.
“If you’re promoting xenon as a performance enhancer, but you’re not also willing to examine what that means for fairness and integrity in the mountains, it’s a problem,” says Adrian Ballinger, an American mountain guide who leads Everest expeditions, to the BBC’s Navin Singh Khadka.
Some also worry that xenon could harm Nepal’s tourism industry, since mountaineers will be spending less time—and, therefore, less money—in the country acclimatizing for their summits. Officials with Nepal’s tourism department tell the BBC they were not aware the British men were planning to summit Everest without acclimatizing.
“Now that we know about it, we will be discussing the issue and decide on our future course of action,” says Narayan Regmi, Nepal’s director general of tourism, to the BBC.
The climbers, for their part, point out that Everest summiters regularly use methods that were once considered taboo, such as supplemental oxygen and flying in helicopters to reach base camp. More broadly, they argue that summiting so quickly helped mitigate risk and reduce the environmental impact of their expedition.
“Shorter expedition also means less garbage, less resources, less human waste in this sensitive environment,” Lukas Furtenbach, who helped organize the expedition, tells Reuters’ Gopal Sharma in a text message from the Everest base camp.
