According to a story on Men's Journal, a team from Great Britain spent four weeks on Khumbu Glacier, the world's highest glacier, on Mount Everest. They were collecting the rates of melt and were expecting small ponds and puddles. Instead, they found a lake.

Duncan Quincey, the leader of the field study and a scientist at the University of Leeds, said that they knew there were lakes present on top of the glacier, but they have now observed that the ponds on the lower eastern section of the glacier had joined to form a lake the size of several football fields.

Owen King

The Khumbu Glacier stretches for 10 miles on the southwest side of Everest's summit, and mountaineers follow the edge of the glacier on their trek to Everest Base Camp, which sits on the glacier. It is the most crucial one on Mount Everest.

The formation of lakes is not good news for a number of reasons, due to the fact that scientists aren't sure how such large amounts of melt-water pooling on the glacier will affect villages and towns downstream. "The lakes might act as a natural reservoir storing vital water resources or they might pose a hazard to the people living below, or maybe both," says Quincey.

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There's also the impact of melting on climbers. Mountaineers have recently begun to encounter challenges from glacial melt-water already. In 2014, Alan Arnette diverted his ascent of K2 to deal with a newly formed lake on the Baltoro Glacier. An ice dam had broken between multiple ponds, creating a large lake, according to Arnette, "We had to take a six-hour detour to establish a new route around it."

Quincey's team reported that although the upper section of the glacier may not contain large lakes, it is actually melting the fastest. From satellite images acquired over the last few decades and a new technique called Structure-from-Motion (SfM), the team deduced that the section of the Khumbu Glacier at Base Camp was lowering at a rate of around 6 feet every year.

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As the glacier continues to melt, the team has hypothesized that it will ultimately become disconnected from the Khumbu Icefall, giving rise to a fresh set of risks and challenges for mountaineers attempting to reach the summit of Everest. "We don't know how long that will take," says Quincey. "But what we do know is that right now things are changing fast."

The team will return to Everest in May 2016 for additional data collection.