Rescue at Extreme Altitude: Managing the Ethical Considerations in the Language of Risk Management. An International Commission for Alpine Rescue Position Paper
Bibliographic record
Abstract
27:117-122, 2026.Rescue from altitude has additional risks that require specialist knowledge, skills, and ability. Currently, rescue at extreme altitude (>5,500 m) is provided largely by ad-hoc teams responding to a need. The ethics of performing such rescues is controversial, and media coverage rarely considers the complexity of the environment. Organized mountain rescue teams have established processes to manage risk and their conduct to provide a professional service that changes the language of ethical decision-making into a practical, nuanced risk and crew resource management format. The International Commission for Alpine Rescue, along with the International Society of Mountain Medicine, has produced scientific papers on rescue at very high altitude and a position paper on the ethics of extreme altitude rescue. The aim is to improve the safety and outcomes of all rescues at altitude. The position paper, presented here, is targeted principally at those involved in extreme altitude rescue. Organized mountain rescue developed from ad-hoc rescue in response to a need; the same is likely to occur for extreme altitude rescue. Altitude is only one of the risk factors, and the knowledge of modern mountain rescue processes could aid in the advancement of extreme altitude rescue.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.038 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.031 | 0.030 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".