Beneath Everest, a lone caretaker struggles to keep one of the world’s highest laboratories alive

Funding crunch has left the Pyramid International Laboratory-Observatory with just a single staffer for nearly a decade

LOBUCHE, NEPAL— Here on the flanks of Mount Everest, Kaji Bista has spent a decade keeping a lonely watch over a largely abandoned scientific laboratory, waiting for the day one of the world’s highest research stations might once again hum with activity.

“This used to be a vibrant place abuzz with researchers, [but] not anymore,” Bista told this reporter during a recent visit to the Pyramid International Laboratory-Observatory, a joint Italian-Nepalese facility that opened in 1990. The gleaming three-story structure sits at 5050 meters in a remote valley, not far from the renowned base camp used by climbers attempting to reach Everest’s summit. For more than 2 decades, it served as a rare haven for scientists seeking to keep an eye on changing conditions on Earth’s tallest mountain. In 2015, however, shifting scientific priorities cost the lab most of its funding, and its 15-person staff dwindled to just Bista. Now, the tall, soft-spoken man, who grew up in eastern Nepal near its border with India, spends 10 months a year working to keep the aging facility functioning. “My emotional attachment with the lab … keeps me going,” he said.

Bista began working at the lab in 2006, when researchers were regularly making the 8-day trek from the nearest airport to the station. It was originally established to settle a disagreement between Italian and U.S. mountaineers over whether Everest or K2, a mountain straddling the Pakistan-China border, was the world’s tallest. Researchers used GPS measurements to prove Everest was taller, as the Italian climbers maintained. But that work ultimately evolved into a plan, backed by the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) and the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology (NAST), to develop a facility that could do much more.

The Pyramid laboratory and its adjacent lodge went on to provide a comfortable base of operations—as well as electricity and communications gear—for more than 500 expeditions involving more than 200 researchers from dozens of scientific institutions, according to Ev-K2-CNR Recognized Association, an Italian nonprofit that manages the lab for NAST. Those expeditions, as well as data collected by weather and other instruments connected to the lab, have yielded more than 1500 papers, says climate scientist Sudeep Thakuri, dean of the Graduate School of Science & Technology at Mid-West University in Nepal. He says the lab has played an important role not only in his own studies of the region’s glaciers, but also in studies of regional biodiversity, the long-range transport of pollutants, and how people have adapted to living at high altitudes. A string of automated weather stations associated with the lab, which monitor conditions along a 3000-meter gradient rising to 5600 meters, “provide the longest possible time series [of] weather data from such a high elevation,” Thakuri says.

The Pyramid International Laboratory-Observatory once had 15 staff members, but lab Manager Kaji Bista has spent much of the past decade working alone to maintain the aging facility. Athar Parvaiz

CNR did not respond to questions from Science about why it cut funding for the laboratory. But Suresh Kumar Dhungel, a senior scientist at NAST, says discussions with CNR officials have resulted in moves to resume laboratory operations, including an annual payment of about $10,000 to NAST. And Agostino Da Polenza, president of Ev-K2-CNR, says it is working to “regenerate” lab programs. Researchers have recently renewed agreements with research teams that operate weather and other instruments, for example. And Da Polenza says his group plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign later this year to raise more money. “We hope that researchers worldwide, research organizations, and mountain enthusiasts will participate,” he says.

In the meantime, a few researchers are still trekking to the lab. During this reporter’s recent visit, a team from France’s Research Institute for Development had just hooked a sensor to the lab’s renewable power grid. Glaciologist Ines Dussaillant of the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich, a member of the team, said the instrument will help monitor precipitation as part of an effort to understand the behavior of the Mera Glacier, a large nearby ice sheet. “To have [the Pyramid laboratory] is incredible,” she said. “It allows us to measure things which we wouldn’t [otherwise] be able to measure. … I hope that it continues to serve science.”

Bista, who receives a small stipend, hopes to keep it functioning. He does his best to repair balky instruments. “When I face any problem, I take directions from the experts in Italy and then act accordingly,” he said. But sometimes it can take months for spare parts to arrive. During the recent visit, he stood outside the lab in a light snowfall, pointing at a suite of climate sensors up the slope that had failed. “I am helpless and have no clue how to fix it,” he said.

Yet, Bista has not lost hope. “This laboratory will soon be renovated,” he said. “This is my belief.”

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