Highest weather station set up on Qomolangma

Four of the stations were set up at an altitude higher than 7,000 meters. The installation at 8,800 meters is the world's highest automatic weather station, he told Xinhua News Agency.

This year, scientists will use advanced technologies to examine the changing environments and ecosystems on the mountain and the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, as well as study the effects of human activity and climate change on the region, Yao said.

Since the mid-20th century, China has launched multiple research expeditions to Qomolangma, but due to limited resources and technologies, most of the studies were done at an altitude around 5 to 6 kilometers, and there was hardly any environmental data from above 8 kilometers, he said.

As a result, many key scientific questions were left unanswered, such as whether global warming can melt the ice at the top of Qomolangma, and how biodiversity, the ecosystem and composition of air pollutants can change as altitude increases to extreme heights.

China launched its first large-scale scientific expedition in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau in 1973, with the goal of exploring and recording characteristics of the region, Yao said. The second expedition aims to build on that foundation and figure out how these features change over time.