These Climbers Summited Mount Everest in Record Time. Did Inhaling Xenon Help?
British climbers recently reached the top of Mount Everest in record time. They inhaled xenon gas before the trip. But was that the decisive factor?
Part of the Himalayan mountains, Mount Everest is considered the highest point on Earth, reaching a height of more than 8.8 kilometers.
Feng Wei Photography/Getty Images
Last week a quartet of British climbers made it to the top of Mount Everest—and spent less than a week on the total round trip from London. That’s weeks fewer than it usually takes to acclimate to the high elevation, scale the world’s highest peak and head home.
Their guide, speaking to the New York Times, credited their accomplishment to a secret advantage: prior to the trip, the climbers inhaled xenon gas, which may have made their acclimatization to the low-oxygen environment of Everest easier. But experts on the medical uses of xenon are uncertain that it was a decisive factor.
“Maybe there is something there. We just don’t know,” says Andrew Subudhi, a professor of human physiology and nutrition at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, who studies human performance in low-oxygen environments. “From the scientific evidence, I can’t see anything that is definitive or even proof-of-concept yet.”
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How does xenon work in the body?
Xenon is a noble gas—colorless, odorless, inert. But it does affect the body. It’s been used as an anesthetic on occasion since the 1950s, says Robert Dickinson, a senior lecturer in medicine at Imperial College London. Dickinson has long studied another intriguing aspect of xenon: the gas has shown neuroprotective…
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