Mt Everest in 3D: Everest Avalanche Tragedy | Hacker News Reader

Mt Everest in 3D: Everest Avalanche Tragedy

everestavalanchetragedy.com

135 pointsnjsubedi47 comments

This is the thing that I was wishing existed a couple of months ago when I read "Into Thin Air". It's a fantastic read about the 1996 Mount Everest disaster where eight climbers died, but I often had difficulty visualising what was going on. (There's also a film, Everest, due out next year.)

To be better convey what it's like to climb Everest, I think this visualisation would be improved if it had more annotations about what makes climbing difficult and the dangers involved. For example, the Khumbu Icefall is a fast moving glacier with many crevasses and ice towers, and has a habit of hosting avalanches and falling ice towers. Climbers try to limit the amount of time they spent here due to the danger, although Sherpa guides tend to cross it many times to stock Camp 1 in preparation for their clients.

Into Thin Air is a really intersting book, i remember myself looking at maps of Mt Everest whilst reading it. It got me interested in the Mt Everest spectacle. I just finished reading Dark Summit which, imo, was not as interesting but it does show, in a better way than ITA, how in these extreme conditions persons struggle a lot with the simplest tasks and becomes selfish and only focusing on one thing: summit. No matter if they wont make it down.

If you haven't seen it, the MacGillivray Freeman IMAX film "Everest" was shot contemporaneously with the tragedy and is excellent as such made-to-be-shown-in-Science-Centers documentaries go.

I've really enjoyed watching Everest: Beyond the Limit, which is available on Netflix and gives a lot of context on the route.

I second the recommendation of Into Thin Air. If you're at all interested in Everest and mountain climbing, get it. It's a page-turner and I could hardly put it down. ISTR I read it in one sitting.

It's very old (2008) but there is a pretty good PBS/Frontline interactive map (and other assorted info) about the disaster here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/everest/map/

Their documentary about the tragedy "Storm Over Everest" is fantastic. Unfortunately, it can't be watched for free online any more.

I'd like to recommmend Touching the Void, an amazing mountaineering/survival story. Was also made into a movie that the author of the book seems to have favorable opinion of.

There's a documentary also called "Touching The Void", which has fairly in-depth interviews with both climbers involved.

the video documentary is absolutely incredible! the perseverance of the stranded climber is so inspiring.

I am deeply frustrated that there is absolutely zero sense of scale in this visualization. How big are people? How big are the camps? I have no idea.

One crazy way to think about it, looking down at base camp at ~17,000 feet you're looking at a spot that's higher than almost all the mountains in the US.

Driving into Colorado from the west, I drove over a mountain pass that was something like 12000 ft high. When I got to my destination, I thought I'd convert that into meters and compare to the mountains back home in Australia. 12000' is 3600m... and the tallest mountain back home is Kosciuszko, which is 2200m high. I'd just driven over a pass 50% higher than the peak of the tallest mountain back home...

At this level you can't even spot the individual human. They will be barely register as a pixel. To get the idea of the scale look at this: http://www.npr.org/2012/12/20/167621313/a-billion-pixel-tour...

I know it is a sign of the amazing times we live in, but that managed to be less than I expected. It's not at a 3D model, but 'just' a panorama.

And yes, the times are amazing. Look at http://www.everest3d.de/en/everest-in-3d/everest-3d-app.html. It looks like somebody thinks he can make money by selling an app that allows those on Everest to browse a 3D model of the mountain (what else is the GPS option for?)

On a related note, the other huge resolution photo tour of everest seems to have a bunch of clickable links, which take you to more detailed up close photo tours.. this is truly cool as a companion: http://www.npr.org/2012/12/20/167621313/a-billion-pixel-tour...

It would be nice to me able to switch the elevation to meters

Kinda puts into perspective how it's just a bunch of tall, snowy rocks.

The problem with ALL of these images, virtual 3d tours, interactive maps - it just does NOT show scale! What does a person look like in these images? I have never been there, but I have no sense of scale of these images. Can a person be seen from these?

I believe a large tree would barely be visible at this scale.

(Of course, there are no trees because this is far, far above treeline)

I've never seen a photo or visualization that gives a feel for the size of the area at the summit of Everest. There are thousands of photos taken at summit of course, but it's always someone standing on the summit himself, so you don't know how much space is behind the photographer.

According to this source http://www.alanarnette.com/everest/everestsouthroutes.php the summit is 30 square feet (or 3 square meters). I'd still love to see an close-up aerial photo from a helicopter or plane directly overhead.

You won't find helicopter - air is too thin (one of the reasons why rescues are hard). But maybe a plane could give you one.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0509/whats_new/h...

There was a hot air balloon expedition that went over the summit of Everest. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03mp9gp

Thank you.

I get "Not currently available on BBC iPlayer" when I try to play it, but I did find the same video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=E4P...

I linked to the time when the balloon crosses over Everest (40 minutes 56 seconds).

It's still not close enough to give a real feel of how big the summit is.

Would be better if it had meters and showing where people slept, and how many days you have to stay in each camp etc.

The camps where people sleep are marked approximately.

Here's an example acclimatization schedule from one expedition company: http://www.mounteverest.net/expguide/accli.htm The schedule doesn't mention camp 4 because you ideally only stay there the night before a summit attempt.

It's nice to see the Sherpa getting some acknowledgement.

I never understood why, when a rich white dude pays tens of thousands of dollars for a bunch of other dudes to scout a path, clear out obstacles, set up camps and caches, and carefully escort him up a mountain, it's the rich white dude who gets the credit and glory. I mean, it's still a pretty impressive achievement, but it's not half so impressive as the guys who do it day in, day out for a simple living.

I imagine that amongst the Sherpa, it's the guides that get the recognition, and one rich white is much the same as another. Cultures tend to lionise their own members.

I'm still mesmerized - the technology behind the site and the the beauty of nature. I will never make it there in my life - but being able to appreciate it almost in first person, makes me so happy. The sound of the wind adds another dimension.

Would have been so cool if I could send this to my Geography teacher in my school 15 years back. She is probably still drawing bergschrund, crevasses, gorges in a blackboard with chalk.

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Really enjoyed the visualization, even if it was a little hard to get a sense of the scale.

With no flat area, Camp 3 looks like a bear to stay at. If anyone is curious, wind speeds get up to an estimated 175 mph (78 m/s) at the summit [1]. I would be worried about being whisked off of the top of the summit.

[1] http://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/extreme-we...

I tried this on an iPad and 3d viewing works with the gyroscope. I got a 360 view on the summit just by spinning around on my chair sitting at home. Very cool!

Yes this is seriously cool effect. Showed it to my five year old and she got dizzy :)

Is it me or is this the first time we have seen an MP4 working in tandem with javascript? Does anyone have any other examples of this? Looks great.

Nope, seen many examples of this recently (but I'm a web developer, and we usually pass around links to the latest and greatest). Of course, I can't think of one off the top of my head now...

If you remember them, please post here... I am surprised there is so little interactive HTML5-MP4 examples right now.

So, I posted before the "billion pixel tour" from NPR, but the guys who actually created it have a far cooler narrative which shows the whole trek, not just one vantage point.. start here: http://explore.glacierworks.org/en/

These guys have video of a lot of that climb. www.trekvisions.com

Never loaded on Firefox.

Never loaded..

Same here. I don't see why privacy invading JS bloat from facebook, twitter, google analytics or scorecardresearch should be critical for its operation.

"Critical?" No. But it was built by a publicly traded media company, so they're probably interested in promoting it and making money with it.

~= They drank the koolaid.

I contract for a media company that handles (and cleanses) PII (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personally_identifiable_inform...). We take this information very seriously. We could give a shit about who you are, we just want you to become the same anonymous number for tracking reasons. Why is this such a big deal? AT WORST you'd get ads actually targeted to your interests instead of bullshit ads you can't click through (see: YouTube). Perhaps I'm sort of less sensitive to this since my first name and last name is a primary key to me (there is nobody else with my name combo on the planet, meaning I'm horribly googleable already).

~= I drank the koolaid.

> We could give a shit about who you are, we just want you to become the same anonymous number for tracking reasons.

Maybe I don't want to become an anonymous number for tracking reasons.

Anyway, maybe your particular company is all nice and responsible, but if so you're hardly representative.

Google Analytics can give a lot of insights to the webmaster about how a site is being used. The others? Meh.

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