In 2016, Nepal’s army drained a lake near Everest after rapid glacial melting threatened to cause a catastrophic flood downstream. This year, a study found that the size of ponds on top of glaciers across the Everest region — which can both signal melting and accelerate it — had greatly increased in the last three years, far outpacing the rate of change from the first decade and a half of the 2000s.

Kami Rita Sherpa worried that scaling Everest, which sits near a major glacier and straddles the border between Nepal and Tibet, was becoming more complex — a troubling development as the mountain continues to be commercialized and to attract inexperienced climbers.

“It will be harder to summit in the coming days if the ice continues to melt,” he said.

The forecast looks grim. In a study on high-altitude warming released in February, scientists warned that even if the world’s most ambitious climate change targets are met, a third of Himalayan glaciers will melt by the end of the century. If global warming and greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rates, the number could jump to two-thirds, according to the report, the Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment.

The report touches on elevation-dependent warming. It is well known that temperature changes from greenhouse gases are amplified at higher latitudes, such as in the Arctic. But there is growing evidence that warming rates are also greater at higher elevations.

In October, a landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change found that if greenhouse gas emissions continued at the current rate, the atmosphere would warm by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040. Under the same scenario in the Himalayas, that figure could reach 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit (2.1 degrees Celsius), the Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment found.

Dandu Raj Ghimire, the director general of Nepal’s department of tourism management, which oversees mountain expeditions, said the emergence of bodies indicated how the region had already changed. After Sherpas reported finding several bodies last year, Mr. Ghimire’s office started looking for ways to safely remove them.