A View of the Top of the World

Picture yourself crawling out of a tent in sub-zero temperatures at 4:00a.m. to inch your way 2000 feet up a glacier or use a rope to get to some inaccessible location. During a typical day you climb, hike, collect rock and sediment samples, and eat rice, curried vegetables, and dhal (lentil curry) before you fall asleep exhausted at 8:00 p.m.

If that does not sound like an ideal way to spend a month of summer vacation, consider another scenario. You’re standing on a glacier looking “tens of miles through incredibly clear skies at some of the world’s most beautiful mountain peaks that rise two miles” above you.

That was associate professor Lewis Owen’s view when he visited Northern Pakistan, a place he keeps returning to and has considered “special” ever since he did his doctoral work there. This time he was co-PI with geology colleagues from the Universities of Alberta, Montana, and Nebraska, Omaha on a trip funded by NSF and the National Geographic Society. Their goal is to examine the relationship between climate change, glaciation, erosion, and uplift of K 2, the world’s second highest and most difficult mountain to climb, and its sister peaks in the Central Karakoran Mountains. The region borders land housing one-third of the world’s population.

The 8,000-meter high mountains in the area outnumber those anywhere else in the world, and Owen’s team wants to know why. Their hypothesis is that large glaciers are causing intense erosion that results in uploading of the Earth’s crust, which then uplifts and produces high peaks to compensate for the loss of mass removed by the glaciers.

To test their theory, they are using three techniques. Computers will model climate change, glaciation, and glacial erosion. The summer fieldwork quantified erosion and landsliding and allowed them the opportunity to collect rock and sediment samples for dating to determine when and where glaciers advanced in the past. The dating analysis will involve months of work in the laboratory.

Owen and PhD student Yeong Bae Seong used remote sensing and field observations to map evidence for the extent of past glaciers and landsliding. The task of dating rocks and sediment in Owen’s lab will involve two new processes: cosmogenic radionuclide surface exposure and optically stimulated luminescence dating. When the project is finished, researchers will understand much more about how mountains form and erode in zones where two continents are colliding, and they will have insight into the impact of climate change and glaciation on erosion and sedimentation in an environment that affects the economies of vast populations.

But Owen thinks he gained other valuable insights as well. He talks of the “incredible” porters who often hauled 100-pound loads of scientific equipment and camp essentials to earn a double wage: “They really put us to shame by carrying far more than we could, while wearing only cheap plastic shoes and without the expensive expedition clothing we had. Some of my best memories are walking and talking with the porters.”

One of the porters was losing his sight as a result of not wearing sunglasses on the glaciers. He was successfully treated by a group of medical students, residents, and their professor from Nebraska, who accompanied the geological team. The medical group joined the expedition to fulfill a wilderness medicine requirement. Its members held clinics in local villages and on the glacier for the porters. An extremely poor nation, Pakistan has little infrastructure, so provisions for community health are almost non-existent in many of the mountain areas. Owen recalls that “it was a real pleasure to work with talented medics as they helped the people, and I learned a lot about community health and high-altitude wilderness medicine.”

But don’t be deceived into thinking that his foray into Pakistan was an infrequent adventure. As of this reading, Lewis Owen is somewhere in India. Probably getting up at 4:00 a.m. to inch his way up more mountains.