Indiana Jones of climate science: the professor who escaped a 70ft crevasse

After filming himself as he clambered out with a pickax, John All has resumed his Himalayan mission

One spring morning in 2014, before breakfast or even coffee, John All, 49, a Mount Everest climber and then a professor at Western Kentucky University, was walking near his tent on a remote Himalayan peak in Nepal called Himlung when he broke through a thin layer of snow and clattered 70ft down a crevasse. He would have kept falling, almost certainly to his death, were it not for a small ice shelf spanning the fissure, upon which he miraculously, if painfully, landed.

Stunned and injured - it turned out he'd broken 15 bones, dislocated his shoulder, and was bleeding internally - All gathered himself in the icy crypt and then, like any good scientist, began to document the ordeal. He thought of his teammates on the mountain, his students back at school, his mother at home in Georgia. They would want to know what had happened to him should he not make it, which seemed likely.