Passing an east-facing window in the late evening I glanced out to look at the mountains in Hunder, and was startled to see the setting sun. It took me a minute to realize that I was looking at a reflection. I stepped back, and then took the photo that you see above: the contrast between the colours of the sky in the east and west, the contrast between the image and expectation, and the contrast between stone and sky. The camera that I always have with me is my phone, and this set of photos captures fleeting juxtapositions of conceptual opposites using that ever-ready camera.
Sitting below Spituk monastery I saw an aircraft taking off. I was eager to capture this contrast between the sessile and the mobile. Someone looked at this photo and said ancient and new. I don’t think that is quite correct; Ladakhi monasteries and philosophy are evolving all the time. I would instead say that the contrasts here are between the contemplation of inner spirituality and exterior physicality: religion and engineering.
A year ago I’d visited Diskit monastery and its statue of the Maitreya Buddha. This statue is over 30 meters tall, and looms over both the monastery and the village below it. Passing on the far side of the Shyok river this time I was struck by the contrast between that superhuman scale and the even larger tectonic scale. The statue is dwarfed by the mountains behind it.
I was very happy to be able to reason out the panorama above before I took it. It is a self-portrait taken on the shores of the Pangong Tso. The panorama sweeps from north to west. You can see the setting sun on one edge of the photo. My shadow thrown by the sun points east. The Family looked at my arms raised above my head and asked “Were you trying to do suryanamaskara? You were facing the wrong direction.” I thought of this photo as a dialectic between self-portraits and landscapes. A phone allows you to do interesting things that old-style cameras are not well-suited to.
Unlike the previous photo, this one was taken without a clear idea of what would come out of it. We were taking a dusty country road through the valley of the Shyok river, and we had to roll up the windows to keep out the dust. I looked at the sky and the landscape outside and thought idly of capturing something about it in the rear-view mirror. I think the experiment is successful. It contrasts the reflection of the sky with the (reflection of) the dusty road we were on. And at the same time it contrasts the closed artificial environment inside the car with the natural world outside.
Weather can change very quickly in the mountains. We had driven down the valley of the river Shyok in a happy sunlit mood. As we started back after lunch in Turtuk, clouds had blown in from the west and the light had turned sombre. The name of the river means death in languages that derive from old Tibetan, and in this dim light it was not hard to make that connection.
The road was smooth most of the way, and The Family nodded off after the heavy meal. Yasin, our guide and driver, was intent on the drive. We’d rolled the windows down and he’d switched off the music so that we could listen to the water and the weather. I was in my groove right now, having put away my favourite camera to utilize the wider angle shots of the landscape that my phone gives. I realize that I could tell the story of the drive back in many ways: as a road trip, as a journey using the metaphor of the Bardo Thodrol (the Antarbhava Nivarna, known in the west as the Book of the Dead), or even as a photo gallery interspersed with technical comments by the photographer.
But the telling that appeals to me are the questions that rose in my mind as I looked out, and the answers that I found later. This land raised profound questions about our place on earth, and figured in a controversy that preceded the writing of the IPCC’s fifth report in 2014. But before I tell you about it, let me give you an impression of the landform that piqued my curiosity. Even though the muddy river was at its widest in summer, when we drove along it, the valley it flowed through was very much broader. The two-lane road seemed to be on a plain, and there was enough flat land around it that the road could have had four lanes through much of the valley. I’d never seen this in a mountain stream before.
Another remarkable feature was the profusion of loose rock and pebbles, some jagged, as if a scree had spilled down slope, others completely rounded as if by the action of water and glacier over millennia. A further enigma was visible in the sand dunes and mud flows that were could be seen at places along the river. This is a special mystery because the land has very little rain: no more than a 100 mm in a year. The patterns of erosion are not due to rain.
What a curious tourist like me sees is a very small part of the questions that arise in the mind of a geologist who walks through this landscape. So all my questions, and more, are answered in the extensive geological literature that is easily available these days. The answer lies in a dynamic and fluctuating history of glaciers and ice dams in the last 150 thousand years in this region. An early study counted over 2000 glaciers active in the upper Shyok valley, which were highly dynamic, receding and expanding rapidly, but whose extent had not changed significantly between 1973 and 2011.
When this paper was published as the 5th IPCC report was being drafted, it gave rise to an immediate controversy about global warming. If glaciers had not melted in the Himalayas, as they had in the Alps, then how could the latter be due to anthropogenic warming? An old friend was involved in the group that found the answer: Himalayan glaciers are mostly rock covered, unlike the open glaciers of the Alps, and it is the thinning of the ice layer under the scree that reveals the extent of melting. Their ground surveys revealed that glaciers here were melting as quickly as Alpine ice flows. Further studies confirmed this, and the IPCC’s AR5 report had a chapter on this topic which reported this as the consensus of scientific opinion.
We passed one of the largest tributaries of the Shyok in this stretch. I had looked down the other valley on our way west in the morning and had a glimpse of the high peaks of the Karakoram range. Even in this light I could see an ice-covered peak as we sped by. In the upper reaches of the Shyok river, after it descends from the Rimo glacier and flows south, the river marks the geological suture between Ladakh and the Karakoram. In the stretch that we drove through, the river had turned north and west, and again come close to the Karakoram range. I can’t figure out from maps which river descended from the Karakoram to join the Shyok so far in the west.
We’d switched between the left and right banks a few times over bridges, most in good repair. The exception allowed a single vehicle to cross at a time. Waiting for our turn in the small queue, I’d told The Family how these crossing were once considered treacherous. The many caravans which were washed away in this stretch of the silk route gave the the river its name, Shyok, the river of death. But these summer floods were seldom caused by rain. They were more often due to the melting of ice dams which had formed over winters. Some ice dams can last quite long, and collect sedimentary deposits, some of which I’d seen exposed during the day. The failure of these ice dams cause enormous floods and quick erosion. This is also perhaps the reason for the wide river valley we saw.
As we approached the Hunder-Diskit area, the clouds opened up, and dappled sunlight streaked the mountain sides. In this place farming and irrigation is transforming the land. The forest department is busy planting cypress in a bid to green this land, forgetting, as it has since colonial times, that introducing an exotic species leads to catastrophe a few decades on. But you cannot fault the locals for turning to agriculture this wide fluvial-lacustrine valley fill, created by the ancient ice dams. Human sympathy is due when impoverished people try to better their own lot through historically tested means such as agriculture. However, it seems that corporations and bureaucracy which follow any such expansion of human activity create changes inimical to the human world. Is this Gaia at work?
Don't hold your breath 