Mountains beyond mountains
Friday, June 12th, 2009This week, Paramesh Banerjee, one of the visiting researchers here at the Earth Observatory, showed a few photographs from his work in the high Himalayas. For many years, he and his Northwest India-based team have been scurrying across the western part of the mountain range and plunking down global positioning system stations on ridgelines and passes. They’ve been able to show convincingly that the convergence of the Indian Plate and the larger Eurasian plate above it will some day pull all of India into the Himalayas. Banerjee likens it to a table cloth full of sand being pulled under block of wood: as the cloth moves under the block, the sand continues to pile up, until you run out tablecloth. (Naturally, Indian leaders were a bit alarmed, but Banerjee convinced them he was talking on billion-year timescale).
His photos (a few below) and stories, however, show how hard won this GPS-backed thesis was.
There was the time the team spent 26 days on the wrong side of a river, after a flash flood washed out the bridge (luckily they always pack trailers full of food). Or the whiteout Banerjee woke up in one morning; that meant four days in a tent in a snowy valley, waiting for a road pass to clear. Colleagues plunged off a road after a busted wheel, never to be heard from again. Landslides. Faint-inducing climbs. Each season brought its new challenges, to be survived only with mountaineers’ pluck. The sense you get from the photos is of a place moving to its own economy, completely oblivious to us. We cling to its billion-year lifespan like a rickety road on the back of a soaring range. And yet it beckons. “I’ve become spiritual,” Banerjee said. In the summers, some of his research areas in the province of Ladakh are flooded with pilgrims.
I thought immediately of Mountain Patrol (or Kekexili as it’s known in Chinese), the movie I’d seen a couple of years ago, about an anti-poaching unit just the other side of the Himalaya from Ladakh, on the wide-open Tibetan Plateau. We watched it again today on a screen in the Earth Observatory lobby today at lunch. It’s lurid landscapes and raw tale seeped into the bones again. There is a moment in it when some of the patrollers sit under a technicolor starscape and one tells a journalist tagging along about a visiting geologist a few years back. The scientist told the patrollers, “Your footsteps could be the first traces of human kind out here.” The geologist later vanished in Kekexili. Probably quicksand, a patroller suggests. Absorbed by the landscape. How could he not be?