March 20, 2024 — “David Breashears was many things: An immensely skilled mountaineer who’d summited Everest five times and knew the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges like the back of his hand,” said Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. “Above all, David was a longtime friend and comrade-in-arms who was both photographically and personally the heart and soul of our COAL + ICE project.”

Last week, mountaineer, author, photographer, and filmmaker David Breashears passed at age 68 in his home in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Breashears summited Mount Everest five times, becoming the first American to summit it a second time in 1985. His most famous ascent of the mountain came in 1996 when filming the IMAX documentary Everest, which would become the highest grossing IMAX documentary of all time. As his team was preparing to summit on May 10th, 1996, a blizzard hit, killing eight climbers in a tragedy that was later documented by journalist Jon Krakauer in his book Into Thin Air. 

According to Krakauer, Breashears offered his spare oxygen tanks and batteries to rescuers looking to find the lost climbers. “He said take it all; he risked the whole film,” Krakauer said in an interview with The New York Times. “This [film] was the most important thing in his life, and he said it was no big deal.”

But later in life, something became more important to Breashears than reaching the summit: climate change advocacy. 

As an Arthur Ross fellow at Asia Society’s Center for U.S.-China relations, Breashears started the Glacier Research Imaging Project (GRIP), which would later evolve into Breashears’ own nonprofit organization, GlacierWorks, which documented glacial retreat throughout the Greater Himalayan region. In a statement following his passing, Breashears’ family described GlacierWorks as “what fulfilled him most” and “where he’d want his legacy to lie.”

For GlacierWorks, Breashears would retrace the steps of renowned mountain photographers of the past century to recapture images from exactly the same vantage points, revealing the alarming loss in ice mass throughout the Himalaya. 

“These are basically two different glaciers. The early photo shows a glacier 300 feet higher and mostly flat and this one is quite treacherous, filled with crevasses and ice pinnacles,” said Breashears in a 2011 interview with Asia Society, describing the differences between a photo of the Main Rongbuk Glacier he took in 2007 and George Mallory’s 1921 version.

Asia Society Museum presented this work in the 2010 exhibition, “Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers in the Greater Himalaya,” where Breashears’ glacier photographs were displayed alongside corresponding historic images. Asia Society also partnered to bring Breashears’ photographs to Copenhagen on the eve of COP 15, to New Delhi for Asia Society’s Asian Corporate Conference, and to Everest Base Camp. The photographs are now a core part of the immersive COAL + ICE exhibition which premiered in Beijing in 2011 and is currently on display at Asia Society in New York.

Educating young people was the biggest driver behind Breashears’ efforts. “You can only reach so many people with a big photo exhibit,” Breashears said in a 2010 interview with The New York Times. “The people whose minds we want to change are the 15-year-olds who, in 10 years, can have their Ph.D. and will have come out looking at the world with a different ethos.”

“David would attend a fancy event if he absolutely had to, but he never hesitated to find the time to talk with young people about the mountains and climate change,” shared Leah Thompson, a producer of COAL + ICE. Her colleague Jillian Schultz reiterated, "At every presentation of COAL + ICE across the globe, David prioritized spending time with young people in the exhibition, sharing his experiences in the mountains of Nepal, China, and Pakistan, and imparting the causes and consequences of these vanishing glaciers.” 

Breashears’ photography will be on display in COAL + ICE at Asia Society in New York through August 11, 2024. Plan your visit here.