Okay. So we are on our way to Tanta.
Beautiful valley, amazing geology, amazing glaciology.
Crazy high mountains.
Beautiful glaciers.
And we are probably an hour away from Tanta.
We had about 4500 metres above sea level right now.
We are climbing our first moraine, this massive
glacial deposits, which we're going to sample today.
And it's not a big climb, but at this elevation,
as you can hear from my voice it's a struggle.
Amazing geology across the lake
and also more moraines everywhere around us.
This is really a paradise for a glacial geomorphologist,
a glaciologist or anybody who's interested in these environments.
Plenty of boulders to sample, which will tell us how old this moraine was deposited.
And here is our valley.
So the next few days we'll sample a number of
glacial deposits along
this valley.
This one that I'm standing on is the largest one.
You can see it has
a very big
left moraine and right moraine
that joins towards the end.
You see this alignment of massive blocks.
This is again, a deposit by a glacier.
So how do we know that these are glacial?
Well, think about it for a second.
They are as they have a shape.
A distance shape.
It's a line.
They've been deposited by something.
And what other phenomenon could possibly carry
something this size and be able to deposit it
in such a perfectly geometric way.
There are of course other slightly more complicated
evidence of this.
But, you know, when you see the size of these
boulders, there's no question that a glacier deposited
this probably, you know, 40,000 years ago, something like that.
But that's what we are here to try to understand
exactly how long they were deposited.
Quick update, it's 7:30 in the morning.
It's a beautiful day so far, but
the forecast suggests that there will be
a pretty bad storm later in the day
with lightning and snowing tomorrow.
So our original plan was to actually go camping tonight
up high at 4700 metres above sea level.
But we decided to be
careful and safe and to actually change the plan.
It's a pity from a scientific point of view, but we'll make what we can today
for as long as the weather is good, we will go to visit
some other moraines and sample more boulders.
But we will not head to the valley head.
I think it was the right decision because up at this elevation, struggling
with altitude, you know, lifting the rucksack, for example, is tiring.
And climbing a few steps is really tiring.
Going in to a very long
walk up to the valley head
and then risking finding ourselves in a big storm
and a snow storm and it's really not safe.
So safety is
of primary
importance when we do fieldwork up in the mountains.
And so I think we've done the right choice.
And I'm sure there will be
plenty of science coming from the many samples that we already collected
and the many more that we will collect across the next few days.