Nat Geo team discovers foot believed to be that of Everest climber Sandy Irvine: NPR

The Himalayas are seen from the summit of Mount Everest in Nepal on May 31, 2021.

Lakpa Sherpa/AFP via Getty Images

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Lakpa Sherpa/AFP via Getty Images

Suspected partial remains of Andrew “Sandy” Irvine have been found by a team National Geographic Mountaineer, the magazine reported Friday, a century after the British citizen lost his life in an early attempt to climb Mount Everest.

The team, led by photographer and filmmaker Jimmy Chin, discovered the worn leather boot with the socked foot inside protruding from a partially melted chunk of ice on the central Rongbuk Glacier below the mountain's north face in September.

“I picked up the sock,” Chin said National Geographic“And there’s a red label that has AC IRVINE sewn into it.”

Irvine, a 22-year-old Oxford student, went missing along with his climbing partner George Mallory, 37, during an attempt in June 1924 to climb the world's highest mountain.

Had they been successful, the team would have been the first to reach the summit of Everest. But the pair disappeared and were declared dead, and questions still remain as to whether they actually reached the summit.

The first people confirmed to have climbed the epic peak were New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Indian Sherpa Tenzing Norgay almost three decades later, in 1953.

Since their deaths, Irvine and Mallory's ultimate fate remains a mystery.

Mallory was an experienced mountaineer who had taken part in previous British expeditions to Everest. His well-preserved remains were found during the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition in 1999.

Mallory's body showed signs of severe injuries consistent with a steep fall. But for the next quarter century the question of what happened to his less experienced partner remained.

The National Geographic The team's find provides an important part of the long-standing mystery about what might have happened to the couple and how close they got to the mountain top.

In conversation with National GeographicChin said he wouldn't go into detail about where exactly the booted foot was found to discourage people from just making a name for themselves. He said that based on the location of the boot, he was confident that the rest of Irvine's remains could be found relatively nearby.

“It definitely reduces the search area,” Chin said.

The climbing team packed their find into a cooler and handed it over to the China-Tibet Mountaineering Association, but not before securing a DNA sample that they could hand over to the British consulate to definitively identify the remains.

“But I mean, dude… there's a label on it,” Chin said, expressing confidence in the veracity of the team's discovery.