The number of deaths trying to conquer

Mt. Everest – a data visualization

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More than 10,000 people have climbed Mt.
Everest
Climbing the 29,029 ft Mt Everest is the ultimate
achievement of the human spirit. First to do it in
1953 : Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay

Since the 1980s, the number of successful

summiteers has been increasing. More than 800
have climbed in 2018 and 2019

However a number of people have also died in the

cold, harsh conditions

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“Traffic Jams” leading to deaths
Recently a lot of attention has been focused on
the “traffic jam” caused by the number of
people waiting for their turn in the death zone

There is also the need to clean up the treks

which in itself is a huge endeavour

Even dead bodies lie decomposed as it is

difficult and costly to bring it back to the base

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Causes of death
• Accidents
• Avalanche
• Falling ice
• Crushed under serac
• Fall into a crevasse etc.
• Effect of altitude on the body
• Possible exhaustion, exposure or starvation
• Mountain sickness
• Heart attack
• Unknown

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Data Sources

• The data for this has been taken mainly

from Wikipedia and dates till the month of May 2019. We
have compared these numbers to some of the summit and
death numbers published at everesthistory.com and mostly
match the Wikipedia number except by one or two.
However data is available on this site till 2004 only. We
have looked at a fantastic blog maintained by Alan Arnette,
himself a successful climber, to piece together some of the
summits by year data. It is difficult to get very accurate
numbers and hence some of these are approximate but
shows the trends and paints a good picture . Thanks to
everyone who have collected and put together the data.

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