Lecture: Making and Breaking Mountains
Speaker:
Entry Fee
Members: Free
Visitors: £5.00
Date and Time
19:30 -
Location
Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, 16-18 Queen Square, Bath BA1 2HN
Lecture Description
What do you need to make a mountain? Come to that, what exactly is a mountain? How do we define some lumps in the landscape as hills, and others as mountains? How long do they last? Answers to the questions above, some of them potentially correct, will be peppered through this richly illustrated talk. Starting from a very general, possibly even philosophical perspective of mountains, we will wend our way through the foothills of understanding how and why different mountains form, looking at some critical clues in the rocks. Trekking on into high Himalayan valleys, we’ll look at the role of rivers and glaciers in crafting mountain landscapes, before ascending into the rarefied air and turbulent weather of the high peaks. Having reached that vantage point, we can gaze down with a different perspective on how mountains might be broken down. Along the way, I’ll be enlisting the help of (among others) Douglas Adams, Hugh Grant, and Sir Francis Younghusband to help enlighten (or just lighten) the discussion.
Dr Tom Argles is a lecturer at the Open University, who has worked on various mountain belts in the last two decades: southern Spain, California, South Australia, the European Alps and the Himalaya. Currently enjoying a break in research funding, he is trying to make sense of all the data he collected during field seasons in Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Tibet.