AS AN explanation for the deaths of eight climbers on Mount Everest in 1996, it reads like a nasty ending in a nursery rhyme. According to a new analysis of the weather, the mountaineers lost their lives when the sky fell down.
The victims were members of a group of 26, and perished when a seemingly calm day turned stormy. Kent Moore, a physicist from the University of Toronto in Canada, thinks this happened when the stratosphere sank down onto the mountain’s summit.
Usually Everest’s 8848-metre peak sits just below this layer of the atmosphere. But on 10 May that year there were two streams of…
