Geographer Mariusz Potocki was one of the people who participated in the unique expedition to Mount Everest. Their mission was to create the highest weather station in the world and collect the ice core at an altitude that had never been done before.
A team of scientists who climbed the highest peak in the world, led by experts from the National Geographic Society and Tribhuvan University in Nepal, installed two weather monitoring stations at 8430 meters and 7945 meters. The data collected by the transmitters are intended to help researchers better understand how rising global temperatures affect the melting rate of glaciers. The team also collected an ice core sample at an altitude of 8,020 meters, which will help scientists study the characteristics of mountain precipitation and atmospheric composition in pre-industrial times.
The almost two-month expedition involved over 30 scientists from around the world, including seventeen researchers from Nepal and one Pole, Mariusz Potocki.
Potocki is a geographer and glaciologist, i.e. a researcher of glaciers. Since childhood, his passions were geography and chemistry, but after high school he decided to focus on the first one, choosing studies in this field at the University of Warsaw. During his studies, he took part in many expeditions, during which he did a lot of valuable scientific work, but this did not provide him with a place for doctoral studies. His candidacy was rejected because the faculty wanted to focus on developing research in the field of socio-economic geography, not physical, which is Potocki’s domain. That’s when he decided to quit everything and go to … Antarctica, where he was waiting for him to work at the Polish Polar Station Henryk Arctowski.
At the end of his a year and a half stay, the station was visited by CBS television, which was preparing material about glaciers. Fate wanted her to be accompanied by prof. Paul Mayewski from the University of Maine, who, after getting to know Potocki, offered him doctoral studies at his university, which the Pole gladly agreed to. The rest is history – 10 years later Mayewski and Potocki conquered Mount Everest together during an expedition organized by the National Geographic Society
source: National Geographic
