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MOUNT EVEREST: Andrew Irvine is one of the estimated 120 climbers whose bodies remain unclaimed on Everest's slopes.
© CARSTEN NEBEL, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

On June 8, 1924, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine left their camp less than a kilometer from the summit of Mount Everest on a mission to be the first mountaineers to ascend the world's highest peak (8,850 meters). They were never to be heard from again. Whether either man reached the summit—almost three decades before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's historic 1953 climb—has been an open question for nearly 86 years.

Although more than half a dozen expeditions have gone to Everest in subsequent years to determine the outcome of Mallory and Irvine's expedition (a 1999 search turned up Mallory's body), none have returned with definitive answers. The key to solving the mystery, many climbers say, is finding Irvine's remains and with it the missing Vest Pocket Kodak (VPK) camera he was supposedly carrying with him on that fateful journey.

Everest historian Tom Holzel believes that after decades scrutinizing maps and photos of Everest's north face, where the mountaineers are thought to have disappeared, he may have spotted Irvine's final resting place in a high-resolution picture earlier this month. Holzel has begun mounting an expedition he hopes will visit the site either this spring or, more likely, spring 2011.

Old mystery versus modern technology
Holzel put together a 1986 search for Mallory and Irvine that was thwarted by a heavy snow. Now, he and a group of five colleagues (who together have formed the Andrew Irvine Search Committee) say their study of a set of aerial photographs of a 900-meter-wide area of the mountain's north face known as the yellow band has turned up an anomaly on the terrain that is roughly 1.8 meters long and positioned in a manner consistent with a description relayed by a Chinese climber who claimed to have spotted the body of an Englishman up on the mountain in 1960.

The anomaly, which Holzel refers to as an "oblong blob," revealed itself only after a series of experiments that began with the researchers using a computer to morph together two images—a photo taken within the yellow band in 1933 by climber Wynn Harris and a high-resolution aerial image taken of the north face from a SwissPhoto, AG, Learjet in December 1984 at an altitude of 13,500 meters. The latter photo is notable because it is an orthophotographic image, one that is geometrically corrected so that it is an accurate representation of Earth's surface and can be used to measure true distances.

Harris took his photo during a search for the missing climbers. On this photo, he marked an "x" where he found an ice ax thought to have belonged to Irvine. Researchers speculate that the "x" marks the point of a slip by Irvine and Mallory and could provide some clue as to where Irvine's body is located. By comparing Harris's photo with the aerial image taken by SwissPhoto, Holzel determined that the presumed location of the ice ax was incorrect by some 55 meters.

Renewed hope
Bolstered by this discovery, Holzel and two other committee members chipped in to buy a powerful microscope and digital camera they could use to scrutinize the aerial images in fine detail. Holzel used the microscope and camera to take sequential digital microphotographs of the aerial photo at 60 times its normal resolution. Then he used software to compile those microphotographs into a high-resolution color digital panoramic view of the yellow band.

When printed, the panoramic view revealed the likely descent route that Mallory and Irvine (and the Chinese climber in 1960) must have taken. The researchers knew that the panorama's resolution was not high enough to show a recognizable human body, so once the likely route was determined, they used the microscope to look for body-size anomalies in an area consistent with Mallory and Irvine's probable descent route. "Based upon what happened, the body could only be in a certain number of places," Holzel says. "The panoramic view enabled us to figure out where he could have gone down."