Equatorial snow once made Europe mock Carstensz
Puncak Jaya—Carstensz Pyramid—rises 4,884 metres on New Guinea, the highest island summit on Earth and the top of Indonesia and Oceania. Often counted among the Seven Summits, it outranks every crest between the Himalayan and Andean belts, with Grasberg, the world’s second-largest gold mine, only four kilometres west.
Amungme speakers call it Nemangkawi Ninggok, Peak of the White Arrow; the Indonesian Puncak Jaya means Glorious Peak, and it also goes by Mount Carstensz or Mount Jayawijaya. Neighbouring summits include Sumantri at 4,870 metres and Ngga Pulu at 4,863. The surrounding highlands were settled long before Europeans arrived. When the Dutch navigator Jan Carstenszoon glimpsed glaciers on a clear day in 1623, he was mocked at home for claiming snow near the equator.
Its ranking depends on the map. If New Guinea counts as part of the Australian continent, the peak tops Oceania, beating Mount Wilhelm, Aoraki/Mount Cook and Kosciuszko, which is why many lists of the Seven Summits include it. Because Western New Guinea is administered by Indonesia, it can also be treated as Southeast Asian, where it ranks only eighth, behind Hkakabo Razi and six other Myanmar peaks.
Hendrik Albert Lorentz reached the snowfield of Puncak Trikora, 170 kilometres east, in 1909 with Dayak Kenyah porters, and a forerunner of Lorentz National Park followed in 1919. The Central Range was thrust up in the late Miocene Melanesian orogeny as the Australian and Pacific plates collided obliquely, and it is built of middle Miocene limestone.
The summit itself is bare, but glaciers such as the Carstensz Glacier and the Northwall firns cling to its slopes. Records show retreat since the 1850s, implying warming of about 0.6°C per century up to 1972. Trikora’s ice was gone by 1962, the Meren Glacier vanished between 1994 and 2000, and Lonnie Thompson’s 2010 expedition measured thinning of seven metres a year, with a 2018 forecast that the ice would disappear in the 2020s.
Source: Puncak Jaya
