Ever faster, ever more expensive: xenon takes on Everest

A human body suddenly plunged into the thin air of high altitudes is subjected to intense physical stress which, without immediate action, quickly leads to death. This fact has been known since, in 1875, two French balloonists died aboard their balloon, the Zenith , after reaching an altitude of 8,600 meters in one go. Since the end of the ^19th century, physiologists have been exploring the effects of hypoxia, the lack of oxygen due to the decrease in atmospheric pressure, and the remedy that can avoid this undesirable outcome: acclimatization.

George Mallory (1886-1924) was well aware of all this. The first man to seriously consider climbing Everest paid with his life: on June 8, 1924, the clouds closed in on his figure climbing to over 8,200 meters, with his companion Sandy Irvine (1902-1924). Because he may have been the first to reach the summit, his case fascinates all those who study the mystery. But the Englishman, whose mummified body was found there seventy-five years later, left us much more than an enigma: his intimate writings, collected over the years, are a magnificent testimony to what the first ascent of Everest could have been like if only he had been able to return to tell the story.

Two years earlier, in the spring of 1922, George Mallory was already part of the British expedition that would attempt the first "assault" on Everest. He walked towards the Roof of the World, fully aware of the effects of hypoxia and of the experiments conducted in chambers to reproduce the drop in pressure experienced at high altitude: "The pace will suffer, and the mind will also be in a deplorable state," he wrote in Towards Everest (Paulsen-Guérin, 2024) . Experiments conducted in hypobaric chambers can shed light on this point. I cherish the story of Professor Haldane who, finding himself in such a chamber, wanted to observe the color of his lips and looked at himself for a few minutes in a mirror before discovering that he was holding it upside down." In severe hypoxia, the brain slows down before the body.

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