An Aerial Photographic Search for Andrew Irvine on Mt. Everest
"Recognition": An awareness that something perceived is a known thing.
The question was, could we spot the body of Andrew Irvine lost on Mt. Everest in 1924 by scrutinizing aerial photographs made of Mt. Everest in 1984. His body has been twice sighted at an indefinite location within the Yellow Band. The Andrew Irvine Search Committee was formed, comprised of a small body of Mallory & Irvine aficionados. One member of this committee funded the purchase of two aerial contact print transparencies and one 5µ scan of Everest’s "Yellow Band"—the North Face strata from the NE Ridge down to 8300m. Large-scale prints of the black & white scan (six to ten feet long) seemed to show that the photographic detail is just enough that a recumbent body might be spotted by detailed viewing of the actual film. But where to look?
Examination of the large-scale 5µ-scan printout was extremely useful. It allowed one to cruise the terrain, looking for the obvious descent routes that Xu Jing might have taken in 1960 when he declared that he had taken an unknown "more direct route" down from the first Step, during which he spotted the body of a foreign mountaineer. The large scale printout was most helpful in plotting possible descent scenarios that made sense and eliminating those that didn’t. (The background of this endeavor can be viewed at http://www.velocitypress.com/CopyIrvine.shtml )
A powerful advance was to better determine the presumed location of the 1933 ice ax marking the point of an accidental slip by the 1924 climbers. By taking a perspectively-slanted historical photo marked with the point of the find, and morphing it to a modern aerial photograph, we determined that the presumed location of the Ice Ax Site was incorrect by some 60 yards. Searchers who had climbed through the old presumed location have come back empty-handed.
Fig. 1. By morphing (stretching) Wynn Harris’ marked photo of the location of the ice ax find over the SwissPhoto aerial photograph, we discovered that the Ice Ax Site has been incorrectly sited (blue circle) by some 60 yards.
Searching
the new Ice Ax Site fall line of the 5µ printout immediately revealed a highly
provocative object—an anomalous blob, different in kind to anything around it,
about six feet long and with the narrow end (feet?) facing uphill. Xu said the
feet faced the summit or right, which these do not, (a quibble?). Good Lord, what a discovery!!
Fig. 2. The blue line points to the object that started all the excitement—a sleeping bag-like figure within the "Lobster Claw" terrain feature (green "C") below the Ice Ax Site. But see below what the color imagery shows (Fig. 6-7.). © BSF Swissphoto AG, Zurich.
But objects from a single source—the 5µ printout--have the "monkey face on Mars" problem. A certain object looks like a body from a particular angle. What would another view show?
Only a look at the same spot using a second or third photograph might clear up the question (as it did on Mars). For that we had the two 9 X 9-inch aerial photographs—but how to examine them? On the film, the entire Yellow Band—1000 yards wide--is only about two inches long.
Two Committee members and I chipped-in to purchase a boom-mounted 7-90X trinocular microscope and a CCD camera, and an x-y gliding stage.
The boom arrangement was felt necessary because of the large (9 X 9-inch) film size, which would never fit under a microscope with an integrated stand. But it turned out that the x-y gliding stage required to make our own scan is built such that it was necessary to cut out the relevant piece of film for proper sequencing.
Fig. 3. AmScope trinocular boom microscope and x-y stage. The CCD camera points straight down ahead of the viewing eyepieces. Its image shows on the laptop screen.
The scheme was to take sequential microphotographs of the Yellow Band at the highest magnification the film would support and seam them together using a panoramic photo stitching program.
After much fussing around learning the ins & outs of the procedure, four rows of twelve 60X images were made. These were seamed using PhotoStitch 3.1.
Fig. 4. Part of the Yellow Band taken in 4 rows of 12 images each at 60X showing the seaming overlap of the PhotoStitch 3.1 program. The image is backwards left-to-right because it was desirable to view the film emulsion side without having to peer through a thick clear film layer. Note: All Everest terrain photos © BSF Swissphoto AG, Zurich.
But it was a trial, as the PhotoStitch program resisted mightily to completely assemble such a large file. Eventually, three-quarters of the stitching was achieved by it, to be finished off with a PhotoShop merging program to fit the large sub-assemblies together. Whew!
Committee member John Wood then assembled the same micrograph images using a superior seaming program, PTgui, with this resulting panorama.
Fig.4A. The 83-inch long ultra hi-res image of the Yellow Band. (For a printed copy of this splendid creation, send $250 to VelocityPress, 3 Durham St., Boston, MA 02115.)
The new color printouts serve an important function--to enable cruising the potential pathways looking for suspect objects. Doing this by peering through a microscope is just not practical because one gets lost quickly while moving the image around. (Much like the difference between using a Google map snippet and a large paper map.) With the large printouts, one can easily identify suspect objects and then zero in on them by direct observation of the film.
But how to spot a body? This is where the cognitive recognition factor comes into play, and where the microscope is so important. After studying an optical illusion for a while, many of us suddenly "get it." We suddenly see the illusion element that—even as nothing in the image has changed--completely changes our understanding of what we see. So, likewise, does studying the Everest terrain reveal, eventually, whether an object is a natural terrain feature or a possible body. So the large printouts direct us to suspect objects, while studying them on the film image under a microscope allow us to glean whether the object is indeed a possible suspect.
But what would a six-foot body look like? The resolution of the film is not high enough to show a recognizable human lying jammed in a slot in the rock. Especially as he was wearing dark clothing and had his face was blackened by frostbite. Instead, the best we can hope for is a tiny convex oblong blob in a likely place. Due to subtle shading caught by the film (shading is much less resolution dependant), one thing that shows up remarkably well is the contour of the ground. There are many, many six-foot long blobs, but most turn out—after repeated study—to be concave, i.e., shallow gullies which are not likely to be Irvine. There are a few, at the edge of resolution limits, that appear convex. One of those that lie on Xu’s likely descent path might indeed be Irvine.
Fig. 5. Comparison of a color micrograph with the black & white SwissPhoto 5µ scan image of "the Needles" on the NE Ridge. Realize that the surface graininess in both images is film grain, not terrain detail. But such high-frequency "detail" (grain) gives the false impression of terrain sharpness that is not there. The 5µ-scan shows sharper edges (a possible enhancement effect) while the color image shows ground surface swelling and shaded color differences missing in the black & white. © BSF Swissphoto AG, Zurich
Fig. 6. The "Lobster Claw" terrain feature of Figure 2 within which a body seemed to lie based on the 5µ-scan image. The left image is the Analog Devices 5MP camera; the picture on the right our 3MP camera image. Again, the graininess is NOT terrain features but rather film grain and sharpening artifacts. Would higher resolution of the camera provide more information? See below. Most of the individual photomicrograph images for the panorama have a resolution of only 100 kb to a maximum of 300 kb. Both these cameras do a pretty good job resolution-wise of showing what is there. The only thing they do not do well is replicating the large gamma of subtle gray shades that are so useful in determining ground curvature. © BSF Swissphoto AG, Zurich.
Fig. 7. Is there a body lying in the pincer of the Lobster Claw? It does not look so. If not, where can the illusion of a body of figure 2 have come from? Shown below is one possibility:
Fig. 8. The two top objects are a convex body shape with its shadow growing stronger away from the top to the left, and a concave slot with an edge that cuts off the view of its deepening shadow.
Once blurred (second row) both objects look the same—like a convex blurry body in a sleeping bag. All this blurriness is the lens through which small detail of the aerial photographs present themselves.
But the major discovery made using this photo-analysis is this one--"the Red Slash."
Fig. 9. [27 Mar 2010] The Red Slash and enhancements. The green circle shows an anomalous terrain feature--the "Red Slash" (because it appears quite red in the microscope view)--on Film A that is alongside our presumed descent route for Xu (blue line). It points uphill toward the summit as Xu described. Its location is such that he would have passed the body on his right. The entire "Slash" is about 20-ft long. Several enhancements were made: An enhancement of the shadow area (middle) in which we darkened only the pixels of the same color results in a faint quasi-body shape standing out from the surrounding dark rock cleft. Or just a deeper part of the gully. The right image is 270X version in which the overall image contrast is further manipulated ("Enhanced"). It, too, is suggestive of a body. Then we arbitrarily darkened that part of the enhanced portion that we think could be a body ("Doctored") to let readers see which shape we mean. The Slash appears strikingly apparent on film B, but much less so on film A. (Thank goodness for multiple images!) As with all enhancements, you have to be careful you aren't simply manipulating the image to make it produce what you want to see. So they must always be taken with a grain of salt.
Fig. 10. [27 Mar 2010] What we first thought was a snow-sculptured body must in fact be a rock. Note several similar-shaped such rocks to the right of our suspect body. The Red Slash in this B&W scan is barely noticeable because of the new snow which probably filled most of it up. The location is just a few meters above the lower of Xu’s two presumed descent routes (orange lines). The location—if it is Irvine—suggests he and Mallory continued down—probably separated by the ice ax fall. Irvine followed the upper orange route only to fall again.
The location of the "Red Slash" in the Yellow Band is shown below (red dot).
Google Earth puts the Red Slash location at:
27°59'44.47"N
86°55'53.02"E
I estimate the altitude at 8425m = 27,800 ft.
Fig. 11. Location of the "Red Slash" object (red dot), directly on Xu’s presumed descent route (orange line). If this is indeed young Irvine, it means the two both survived the ice ax fall (blue dot), and each struggled--probably separately--onward toward Camp Six. Irvine must have taken the green line. Above the red dot, Irvine fell again. Mallory did not find his comrade in the white-out of the snow squall and continued on eventually exiting the Yellow Band onto the "8200m Snow Terrace."
The great advantage of the microscope eyeball view of the film image, which is poorly represented by the camera, the computer screen and the printed image, is that of offering many subtle shades which help to tell the concavity of the terrain. Printers and digital cameras have great trouble duplicating the subtle gradation of shades compared to film--at least the ones we could afford.
Fig. 12. Searching the routes of our 94-inch long color printout of the Yellow Band with a loupe. The scale of this photo map is 1:270. One centimeter on the map equals 2.7 meters on the ground.
Can we claim we have found Irvine’s body as we had hoped? Our microscopic examination has unseated our primary suspect, the "Lobster Claw" object. Detailed microscopic examination of the aerial photographs revealed the very distinct "Red Slash" anomaly on Film A, and more weakly so on Film B. There are no other features exhibiting this unusual color, or its slot-like architecture. The Red Slash is about 3 X 20-ft long. It is unusually angled toward the summit of the mountain, as Xu said Irvine's body was oriented. It is close enough--20-30 feet--to one of the only two natural descent lines that Xu is likely to have taken. The object lies so that it is on Xu's right as he passes it by, as he described. (This latter condition was a major weakness of the Lobster Claw location.) Enhancement in the color film of the dark area of the slash results in the appearance of an oblong shape roughly six-feet long near the top of the slot. So the signs are very good. However, as with all speculation, it will take crampons in the snow to get the final answer to this long quest.
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Richard MontagueAndrew Irvine Search Committee
Gordon Brown
For background on the "mystery of Mallory & Irvine," see: http://www.velocitypress.com/mallory_irvine.shtml