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– Mount Everest is in the Himalaya,
which is the biggest, highest mountain range
in the world.
It stretches across a large section of Asia.
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Mount Everest is the highest peak
in that big mountain range.
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You get there by flying to an airport
at about 11,000 feet.
From there, you hike up all the way
to Everest Base Camp at about 17 and a half thousand feet,
and you look up at the summit and you can’t believe
how high it is above where you are.
And my role in this expedition is twofold.
First off, I’m in charge of the mapping team,
and then I’m part of the team that’s helping
to organize the logistics, getting permissions,
and working with the Nepali Government.
The mapping team that I led was four people.
(clink)
Two of us working ground-based data collection
and two working from helicopter-based
data collection.
One of the big scientific questions
this expedition is answering is how climate change
in particular is happening in the high mountain regions.
Everybody’s heard of Mount Everest,
it’s the tallest mountain in the world,
it catches people’s attention.
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And we’re doing an incredible amount
of scientific research on the highest glacier
in the world, which is the Khumbu Glacier.
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– The Khumbu Glacier is the primary route
for ascending to the summit of Mount Everest
from the south.
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– One of the main reasons for the mapping work
we’re doing is to understand how quickly
the glaciers are changing.
Terrestrial LiDAR that’s mounted on a tripod,
it just slowly rotates and captures information
about the distance to every object that it sees.
LiDAR is Light Detection And Ranging.
LiDAR is a mechanical device that sends out
a beam of light that bounces off
every object that it reaches.
The bouncing light is then recorded
back at the original device,
and so you get a measurement of the distance
to everything that the light hits.
That can be a tent, it can be a rock,
it can be the snow and ice.
And so, you get a series of points
all around the LiDAR device
and you get their position in space,
and so you know exactly where that point is.
It is the collection of all these different points
that allows you to create a three-dimensional model
of the world around the LiDAR device
as far as the light reaches.
Sonar and radar are also good analogies
for the way LiDAR works.
They also are detecting the range
of a pulse that’s sent out,
and then returns to the device.
If you think about a submarine using sonar
to locate objects underwater,
that’s very, very similar.
And if you collect enough of those sonar pings
and put them together, you’ll have what’s called
a point-cloud of information.
All those coordinates in space,
you can then see a picture of three dimensional space.
That’s the most incredible thing
that comes out of sonar and LiDAR
is being able to see three-dimensional space
in a computer environment and then be able
to model it and use it for further analysis
of information.
The map you’re looking at here
is the actual image that I see
as I’m collecting data.
So, each of the red dots is a LiDAR station,
and the lab here will then take all that data,
work in very high-end 3D software
to stitch it together so that each station
connects to the other station in a precise way
and all the photography can also be integrated
with the 3D model.
This clip may look like conventional video footage,
in fact, it is a 3D model made from detailed
LiDAR data combined with digital imagery.
At Everest, we were using GIS to collect
layers of information about the rock
and snow and ice, information about the local weather,
and the longer-term climate in the high mountains,
and how those elements of the high mountains
were changing over time.
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The power of data is pretty straightforward.
It’s very powerful for gaining knowledge
about how our world works
and how it has changed and will change.
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The hope that comes out of this expedition
is a hope about human beings being able
to adjust to life on this planet
in a way that we aren’t destroying
the environment that we depend on.
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And if we can start working and addressing it now,
it’s just a lot more hopeful for a successful future.
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