Place · mountain · Pakistan
Nanga Parbat
At 8,126 metres the ninth-highest mountain on earth and the western anchor of the Himalaya, standing where the range ends and the Indus turns south around its base. The Rupal face is the greatest continuous mountain wall anywhere, something over four thousand metres from meadow to summit. Locally it is Diamer, the king of mountains. German expeditions of the 1930s lost enough climbers on it to earn it the name Killer Mountain, and Hermann Buhl reached the top alone and without oxygen in 1953.
- Function
- Landscape & environmental change
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 35.237, 74.589
Worth knowing
The Indus runs at about twelve hundred metres within twenty-five kilometres of the summit, which makes the relief between river and peak among the steepest on the planet — the mountain is rising faster than the river can cut.
Connections (2)
- River flowSindhu / Indus
The Indus turns the corner of the Himalaya around the base of Nanga Parbat, and the two are a single geological fact. The river runs at about twelve hundred metres within twenty-five kilometres of an 8,126-metre summit, which is among the steepest relief on earth, and the massif is being exhumed so fast that the river is barely keeping pace with the uplift — one of the clearest cases anywhere of a river cutting into rock that is rising to meet it. The gorge this produces is what the Karakoram Highway had to be blasted through.
- Route adjacencyShatial & Chilas
The carvings are where they are because of the mountain. The Indus, forced into a gorge as it turns the corner of the Himalaya round Nanga Parbat, gave the only practicable line between Gandhara and the Tarim basin, and everyone who used it stopped at the same few places. At Shatial and Chilas, below the massif, the rocks by the river carry thousands of petroglyphs and inscriptions in Brahmi, Kharoshthi, Sogdian, Bactrian and Chinese. The Karakoram Highway now runs the identical route through the identical gorge.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Nanga Parbat”. Geological Society studies of the Nanga Parbat–Haramosh massif exhumation rates; Hermann Buhl, Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage (1956).
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