How many colours have those black rock mountains?
Eduardo Garzanti (*)
(*) Dipartimento di Scienze Geologiche e Geotecnologie, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Piazza della Scienza 4, 20126 Milano (Italy).
E-mail: eduardo.garzanti@unimib.it
Abstract
In Uyghur Turkic language, Karakorum roughly means "black crumbling rocks" (kara = black; korum = gravel). But there are in fact many more colours than just black in the Karakorum mountains. Three of them, for sure, are red, white, and green. These three colours, originally decorating the regimental vexillum of the Legione Lombarda (red and white from Milano city, green from Milan Civic Guard uniforms), were proposed to be adopted as the official flag of the Repubblica Cispadana by the member of parliament Giuseppe Compagnoni on 7 January 1797. A century and a half later, on 31 July 1954, those same three colours were waving in the wind on the second-highest but perhaps one of the toughest-to-climb mountains on Earth. Another Compagnoni, the climber Achille, was trampling snow on the top of K2 in the company of Lino Lacedelli and thanks to the heroism of Walter Bonatti and the Hunza Amir Mahdi. Glory and valour will subsequently mingle with false truths, harsh arguments, and never-ending controversies in the fully Italian story of that heroic climb. Chief of the triumphal expedition was Ardito Desio, geologist and explorer of Italian colonies, founder of the Geological Institute at Milano University, which he chaired for forty-five years and now bears his name. Desio had first reached Karakorum in 1929, with the expedition funded by the Comune di Milano and led by Aimone of Savoy-Aosta, Duke of Spoleto, whom Desio had met in 1924 during his surveys of the Dodecanese Islands. While the group goes up the Baltoro glacier, restless Desio explores lateral valleys and succeeds in crossing the range to reach Shaksgam on the northern Tibetan side. His numerous geological and paleontological observations, integrated during subsequent expeditions to Hunza and Chitral, will be published in a series of scattered papers through the following fifty years. But the history of Italian explorations to the Karakorum mountains is older still. It began in 1909, when the team led by Luigi Amedeo of Savoy-Aosta, Duke of the Abruzzi, reached K2 and first attempted what was to become the standard route of ascent, the Abruzzi Spur, located on the Pakistani side of the peak along the southeast ridge rising above Glacier Godwin Austen. The party eventually tried to climb Chogolisa, and although prevented by bad weather from ascending further, set the new world altitude record at 7,498 m a.s.l., only 167 m short of the summit. The report of the expedition was compiled by the expedition doctor Filippo de Filippi, and illustrated by the wonderful photographs of Vittorio Sella. The subsequent expedition, organized and led by De Filippi in 1913-14, was the first joined by geologists, Giotto Dainelli and Olinto Marinelli. Dainelli passed the winter at Skardu, and investigated large parts of the upper Indus catchment. The wealth of scientific observations he collected, subsequently integrated with a new expedition to the Siachen Glacier that he led in 1930, were published in eighteen volumes from 1922 to 1935. In more recent years, geophysical expeditions were led by Antonio Marussi between 1975 and 1978. With the admirable ascents by Reinhold Messner, from the tragic climb of Nanga Parbat in the nearby Himalayan Indenter in 1970, to the double successful assault at the two Gasherbrums in 1984, the Karakorum did not fail to remain a piece of Italian land. On 7 March 1987, following the 1986 American expedition joined by the astronomer George Wallerstein, the New York Times spread the news that K2 might have grown higher than Everest. And Desio was there again, quite surprisingly the quickest at the venerable age of 90 to see and not to miss the opportunity. The challenge was launched with the new "Ev-K2-CNR Project", and the height of the two highest eight-thousanders were efficiently re-measured in 1987 using innovative GPS and traditional survey techniques. Because even in the absence of erosion mountains need well more than a century to grow up a single meter, the new measures were bound to confirm what had been known for more than a century: Everest resulted to be 8872 ± 20 m and K2 the same 8,616 ± 7 m. But a new phase of Italian geological research in the Himalayas had begun. The first of the innumerable expeditions to the Karakorum mountains had already taken place in summer 1986, recalled as perhaps the unluckiest period ever for mountain climbers. Thirteen of them lost their lives on K2, five in the heavy storms between August 6 to 10 (the "1986 K2 disaster"). While Wallerstein was trying to measure K2 from the Sinkiang side, bad weather repeatedly afflicted our own expedition as well, some thousands meters below in the Hunza valley. But with no tragic effects other than the usual gastroenteric consequences of precarious meals, hastily consumed under pouring rain, on goat meat getting progressively more mature as the days went by, and occasionally cheered up by immoderate doses of delicious apricots. In the following years, the Karakorum valleys were invaded and re-invaded again by an irresistible horde of tough lombardian geologists, sacking every type of rock and any fossil they could find. Summer after summer, overcoming fatigue and euphoria, up and down one step after the other until the eye-sight goes beyond the pass and stretches out to take possession of the next valley below, the team from Milano University checks and re-checks every single locality, measures every meter of stratigraphic section from the Ordovician to the Cretaceous, thus plunging into the deep past to meet opening and closing oceans, rising and eroding ranges. After this toil, the birth and death of Paleotethys and Neotethys, the Eocymmerian and Neocymmerian episodes are no longer myths, but real historical events revived and reconstructed into every possible detail. In the meanwhile, each piece of exposed rock is scrutinized, recorded, colour-coded, put in its proper place. As Penelope's shroud, the map grows, is emended, improved, modified again. Scruples and doubts continue to lurk in dozens. That outcrop does not fit. Those rocks turn out to be everything but what were expected to be. That correlation remains uncertain at best. That fault does not run where it should. Those beds may be overturned, but not necessarily so. So many features that need change. And those damn areas that are still empty white, faraway places that could not be reached because of bad weather, because time was lacking, because too impervious. The sneaky enemies of the field geologist, preventing him to get nearer to an impossible perfection. Perhaps in a further expedition . . . . . . Until one day, a day that never seemed to possibly come, here it is! The map. In its splendid luster, the single product that is worth it all, that summarizes it all. The final achievement, the result of twenty-five years of team research. Such miraculous gift allows everyone to climb passes without any physical effort, to smoothly fly across ranges of mountains, watching from above as if leisurely sitting on a cloud. The eyes free to travel in every direction, through space in length and width but through time as well, descending across layers and layers of rock as in an elevator to unveil all past secrets of this land, which is today the "roof of the world" but before was continent, ocean and mountain, and then continent, ocean and mountain again, through a series of geological cycles embracing 500 million years and more. All of this innumerable facts prodigiously packed into a mere sheet of paper. A geological flag with its thousand colours, the thousand colours of the Karakorum.
KEY WORDS: Karakoram, Italian Expeditions, Geology of Himalaya.