The Sky Mountains This image shows one of the most remote…

The Sky Mountains This image shows one of the most remote…

The Sky Mountains

This image shows one of the most remote places on Earth. This is a photo taken from an airplane of the Tian Shan mountain range, with this portion coming from far western China. Tian Shan roughly translates as Celestial Mountains or Sky Mountains in English.

The Tian Shan Mountains are the northernmost expression of the collision between India and Eurasia. Remarkably, the actual zone of the collision, the Himalayan Front Range, is over 1500 kilometers to the south of this range; that’s similar to the distance between the French Riviera and the northern tip of Scotland.

Imagine the tectonic stresses here; the India/Eurasia collision is producing a mountain range so far away that elsewhere in the world it would be on the opposite side of a continent.

The Tian Shan Mountains are forming in this location because when the India/Eurasia collision began, it was a weak spot. Asia as we know it today was assembled out of a series of smaller plates that accreted onto its margins over hundreds of millions of years. The boundaries between those smaller plates contain many faults and zones of weakness. The collision between India and Eurasia is incredibly far away, but it has produced enough stress to reactivate some of those old structures, driving the formation of this enormous mountain range.

The peak you see in this image is Khan Tengri. The mountain itself rises 6995 meters but there is also a 15 meter ice-cap on the top of the peak (total height 22,999 feet). It is the second highest peak in the Tian Shan range. Also visible in the foreground is the 60 kilometer long Engilchek Glacier, one of the largest non-polar glaciers in the world.

The Tian Shan area, interestingly, is about as far as you can get from an ocean anywhere on Earth. It’s surrounded on all sides by land and other mountains.

-JBB

Image credit: Chen Zhao

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:West_Tian_Shan_mountains.jpg

Read more

http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Tian_Shan.aspx

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/595280/Tien-Shan