I stepped off the plane and saw the high, snow‑encrusted mountains of the Himalaya. We had flown into the village of Lukla. It’s in the Khumbu Region of Nepal. I wouldn’t see Mount Everest until the following day. When I did, I had to look up to the sky to see the summit.

Are you wondering what I was doing here? I was part of an expedition to Mount Everest. I came because our planet is changing. Right now, we’re seeing dramatic climate changes. We don’t fully understand them. This is especially true in extreme environments like high mountains. We don’t have a lot of data for such places.

Here, we know the glaciers provide critical water resources to the millions of people who live in the Himalaya. They also feed the rivers that flow to parts of Asia where more than one billion people live. Rising global temperatures are causing the glaciers to melt.

We want to know more about this. So, I helped collect data. We want to understand how the mountains are changing.

The expedition took months. The entire team collected samples of ice, snow, rocks, water, and lake sediments. We observed and recorded the plants and animals that live at these high elevations. We also set up weather stations.