As ice melts, Everest's 'death zone' gives up its ghosts

KATHMANDU, Nepal — On Everest's sacred slopes, climate change is thinning snow and ice, increasingly exposing the bodies of hundreds of mountaineers who died chasing their dream to summit the world's highest mountain.

Among those scaling the soaring Himalayan mountain this year was a team not aiming for the 8,849-metre (29,032-foot) peak, but risking their own lives to bring some of the corpses down.

Five as yet unnamed frozen bodies were retrieved -- including one that was just skeletal remains -- as part of Nepal's mountain clean-up campaign on Everest and adjoining peaks Lhotse and Nuptse.

It is a grim, tough and dangerous task.

Rescuers took hours to chip away the ice with axes, with the team sometimes using boiling water to release its frozen grip.

"Because of the effects of global warming, (the bodies and trash) are becoming more visible as the snow cover thins," said Aditya Karki, a major in Nepal's army, who led the team of 12 military personnel and 18 climbers.

More than 300 people have perished on the mountain since expeditions started in the 1920s, eight this season alone.

Many bodies remain. Some are hidden by snow or swallowed down deep crevasses.

Others, still in their colourful climbing gear, have become landmarks en route to the summit.

Nicknames include "Green Boots" and "Sleeping Beauty".

"There is a psychological effect," Karki told AFP.

"People believe that they are entering a divine space when they climb mountains, but if they see dead bodies on the way up, it can have a negative effect."

Many are inside the "death zone", where thin air and low oxygen levels raise the risk of altitude sickness.

Climbers must have insurance, but any rescue or recovery mission is fraught with danger.

One body, encased in ice up to its torso, took the climbers 11 hours to free.

The team had to use hot water to loosen it, prising it out with their axes.

"It is extremely difficult," said Tshiring Jangbu Sherpa, who led the body retrieval expedition.

"Getting the body out is one part, bringing it down is another challenge".

Sherpa said some of the bodies still appeared almost as they had at the moment of death -- dressed in full gear, along with their crampons and