Turkic “black gravel” names Earth’s most glaciated mid-latitude range
The Karakoram spans Pakistan, China, and India—with tips into Afghanistan and Tajikistan—and holds four of fourteen eight-thousanders, including K2. About 500 kilometres long, it carries more ice than anywhere else on Earth beyond the poles, with Siachen (76 km) and Biafo (63 km) among the longest non-polar glaciers.
Starting in Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor, the range runs east into Ladakh, Aksai Chin and Xinjiang, though most of it lies in Pakistani-administered Gilgit-Baltistan. The Gilgit, Indus and Shyok rivers cut it off from the Himalaya to the south, the Pamirs anchor its northwest corner and the Kunlun lie beyond the Yarkand valley. Only the Himalaya stand higher: the Karakoram counts eighteen summits above 7,500 metres, among them the eight-thousanders Broad Peak, K2 and Gasherbrums I and II, and Baltistan alone has over 100 peaks above 6,100.
The name, Turkic for black gravel, first belonged to the Karakoram Pass used by Central Asian traders. William Moorcroft and George Hayward stretched it to the mountains, sometimes also calling them Muztagh, ice mountain, while Sanskrit Puranas knew them as Krishnagiri, black mountains. Thomas Montgomerie labelled the high peaks K1 to K6 from Mount Haramukh in the 1850s. Francis Younghusband crossed the Muztagh Pass in 1887, and fieldwork in the 1910s and 1920s filled in most of the map.
Sitting on the collision boundary of the Indo-Australian and Eurasian plates, the range is between 28 and 50 percent ice-covered, more than 15,000 square kilometres, while the Alps manage 2.2 percent and the Himalaya at most a dozen. Many glaciers wear a rubble blanket that shields them from the sun, and some in the centre and west are stable or even gaining mass, a puzzle nicknamed the Karakoram anomaly. During the last ice age, glacier systems ran up to 700 kilometres and the snowline sat about 1,300 metres lower.
The Khunjerab Pass, 4,693 metres high on the China–Pakistan highway, is the loftiest paved international border crossing and the only road over the range. Kipling mentioned the mountains in Kim in 1900, and Marcel Ichac’s film of a 1936 French expedition won a Silver Lion at Venice.
Source: Karakoram
