WeiPoints #03: Patagonia’s Painted Peaks
A dose of wonder about the world
Take in the beauty of Los Cuernos, which translates to The Horns, as seen from a boat ride that kicked off an epic hike to see the peaks up close. The mountains’ distinctive white stripe makes them look painted!
Hi all!
Exciting news: WeiPoints now has a landing page! All past editions of the newsletter can now be found on my website under the newsletter tab. For now, there’s just the three — but we’re slowly growing bit by bit.
In this edition of WeiPoints, I want to take you all with me on a little geologic journey through some of the fantastical history behind the majestic peaks of Patagonia’s Torres Del Paine (pronounced PINE-ay) National Park. A few short weeks ago I was hiking among the mountains as an expert in Patagonia with National Geographic Expeditions. The trip takes travelers on a circuit through South America, starting in Buenos Aires, looping around the continent’s southern tip, then heading north through Chile.
The region is full of beautiful vistas and exciting wildlife that are all woven together by threads of geologic history. I’m always sad to leave such a gorgeous landscape, so want to share a few of the pictures and just a tiny bit of the history with you.
Coming up…
What a Rock Can Reveal: My first kid’s book is now available for pre-order! I share a sneak peek of one of my many favorite pages.
Adventures through Patagonia: Tales from my National Geographic Expeditions trip
Latest stories: Trove of mantle rocks recovered, a tear under the Himalaya Mountains, and Iceland’s recent volcanic fury
Adventures ahead: Travel schedule for National Geographic Expeditions and Smithsonian Journeys
Update: What a Rock Can Reveal
You are going to get tired of me talking about the book, but the publication is so soon! WHAT A ROCK CAN REVEAL will be shipped worldwide on February 28, and it’s now available for pre-order through Amazon and my Publisher Phaidon’s website.
I recently did a fun interview with TIME for Kids with nine-year-old “Kid Reporter” Ben Stern about the book, and he wrote up a short article for the magazine. The article quotes the first line of the book: There’s no such thing as a boring rock. This was one of the very first things I wrote while brainstorming ideas, and it became a guidepost for me throughout the writing process.
Rocks are the keepers of secrets about our planet’s past and the book is all about how studying rocks helps us unlock that hidden history. Even stones that we might think are commonplace, like granite, can hold surprising stories. Next section we’ll talk all about the formation of an AMAZING mountain of granite in Patagonia. But first, I wanted to share a sneak peek of one of my (many) favorite pages of the book, which shows how all rocks are built from different combinations of minerals.
Most people are familiar with gems, which are big crystals of various minerals. And I love this spread because it connects the more glitzy mineral crystals with some of the rocks they can build. Each speckle is a different mineral with its own crystal shapes, properties, and proclivities for formation.
If you want to check out some of the other press the book has received: It got a nice write-up on the Bookworm for Kids blog, and I talked with the Montessori Post about my past work and writing process.
In other exciting news, I’m collaborating with Tyler Thrasher, an amazing artist and naturalist, to assemble a rock experiment kit for kids! The kit will include a selection of minerals with fascinating properties and the tools needed to test them. Your kids will be in awe as they discover fluorite glows under a black light or lemon juice can make calcite fizz. It’s the perfect companion to WHAT A ROCK CAN REVEAL. Our goal is to release a limited number of the kits in late Summer 2024! Stay tuned for more.
Patagonia Adventures
While in Torres Del Paine a group of travelers signed up to do one of the more challenging day hikes — a 12+ mile trek through a region known as the French Valley. The venture starts with a boat ride across one of the park’s many glacial lakes. But that day’s ride was particularly exciting.
As Patagonian winds are apt to do, they whipped into a frenzy the morning of our hike, making the boat ride a bit more bumpy than anticipated. I was sitting up top to get some fresh air when one of the crew came with a warning. If I wanted to sit in the enclosed space downstairs, he said, now was the time to move.
“More wind, more water,” he kept calling out through the roar of the wind and spray of water that had already soaked some people’s outer layers. I quickly headed down into the belly of the ship. And I was glad I did.
As we moved around a bend along the coast, the winds picked up, slamming the boat’s bow down onto the surface of the water. The whole front of the boat rocked as if its stern were anchored with a hinge. Then came the water. From the safety of the glassed-in room, I watched as a sheet of water crashed over the boat’s bow, eliciting gasps from passengers throughout the room.
When we arrived on shore, the group stumbled onto firm ground, leaning into the winds that threatened to pluck us from the surface. But the group wasn’t deterred. We were on an adventure to get an up-close look at one of the park’s most famous features: Los Cuernos, which translates to The Horns.
These spiky mountains sport a distinctive white stripe across their middle as if someone attacked it with a paintbrush and a pool full of paint. The peaks have an imposing presence throughout the hike. (Shown below and the first image in the newsletter.)
I will never get over how gorgeous these mountains are from every angle. Through the trees you can still see the black rocks capping the peaks and the dark layer at the mountains’ base. :)
To understand the source of that stripe we have to travel back about 12.5 million years ago, when a blob of molten rock more than four cubic miles large was squishing up through the subsurface. The shifting magma infiltrated a crack between two rocky layers and oozed out as a thick sheet. The rocky layers that the magma was traveling through formed tens of millions of years before the molten intrusion.
They were laid down as sediments in a deep watery basin that formed from the bending of tectonic plates as South America tore from the supercontinent of Gondwana. The sediments were later squashed to form a thick sequence of sedimentary rock. But then the magma came along.
Three pulses of molten rock inflated the subsurface like a 6,500-foot-tall balloon—and any rock touching the searing hot blob baked to form the black rocks that still cap Los Cuernos today. Pulse after pulse of magma caused the rocks to bow and fracture, but the geologic balloon never burst. Instead, the molten rock slowly cooled to form a bulging layer of stark white granite. Millions of years of uplift and erosion shaped the mountains into the jagged peaks you see today.
The French valley hike brought us up close to Los Cuernos. As we approached, a loud crack like a gunshot echoed through the valley. It was an avalanche. I peered through the trees to see what looked like a waterfall of snow gushing down the mountain. Less than a decade ago these separate sheets of ice were all connected as a single glacier, one of the major forces that carved the region’s mountains. Now the ice is slowly vanishing, one avalanche at a time.
After what seemed like an endless march up a steep tree-lined path we finally popped out to a breathtaking scene. This was as far as we would go up the valley. We paused to drink up the view. Millions of years ago, the peaks in the two images below were connected as one unified chunk of rock — at that time we would have been standing inside the mountain!
Only a tiny bit of the dark rock is still visible on the top of some peaks. These remaining bits are known as “roof pendants”
On this side was mostly the dark sedimentary rocks left over from tectonic shifts tens of millions of years ago.
My Latest Stories
Deep Beneath Earth’s Surface, Clues to Life’s Origins: Scientists drilled deeper into mantle rocks than ever before, recovering a geologic trove that could hold clues to help decipher the pivotal steps that ignited the first sparks of life.
For more than 60 years, geologists have tried to drill into the mantle—a feat that’s still elusive. But a team has recently accomplished the next best thing: They retrieved a trove of mantle rocks from an area of the Atlantic seafloor where the crust is especially thin. Some scientists have speculated that places like this could have incubated our planet’s earliest life forms.
That’s because when seawater meets mantle rock, a series of chemical reactions generate a cocktail that can create the organic compounds needed to ignite life’s first sparks. Now, the team’s recently drilled hole, which bored more than a kilometer below the seafloor, has reached into what seems to be the beating heart of this system.
“That opens a world of possibilities to us,” said Susan Lang, a biogeochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who co-led the expedition. I detailed the thrilling expedition—and promising future discoveries—in a feature story for Quanta Magazine.
Tectonic plate under Tibet may be splitting in two: As the Indian plate plunges under Tibet, it's doing something weird: part of the slab is peeling in two. This is the first time that the peeling of a downgoing plate was caught in the act. “We didn’t know continents could behave this way and that is, for solid earth science, pretty fundamental,” says Douwe van Hinsbergen, a geodynamicist at Utrecht University. I reported on this oddity for Science Magazine.
Iceland’s Recent Volcanic Eruptions Are Unleashing Deep Secrets: An eruption cracked through the silence of night last December 18 as molten rock burst from the ground of Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula. Moments later, Celine Lucie Mandon’s phone rang, rousing her from near-sleep to alert her of the blast. Around 2 a.m., Mandon, a gas geochemist at the University of Iceland, and three of her colleagues stood before the incandescent fountains of lava, which bathed the snowy landscape and cloud-streaked skies in an otherworldly crimson glow. Illuminated by the surreal radiance of the molten rock, the group delved into the purpose of their late-night venture: collecting lava samples and measuring volcanic gasses. I report on the fascinating revelations from Iceland’s recent volcanic fits for Smithsonian.com.
Icelandic Civil Protection/AP
Adventures Ahead
I’m going to be the expert geologist for trips with both National Geographic Expeditions and Smithsonian Journeys in 2024. This section hasn’t changed much compared to my previous newsletter, but I wanted to include it in each send as a reminder of what is to come. I’d love it if any of you wanted to join these adventures, and I hope to see you all on a trip soon!
March 2-13: New Zealand Journey with National Geographic Expeditions
June 28-July 7: Hiking the Alpe-Adria Trail with National Geographic Expeditions
CANCELLED: July 10-17: Alaska: Denali to Kenai Fjords Expedition with National Geographic — unfortunately, the company has decided to cancel this departure date. Hopefully, I’ll catch another trip to Alaska this year or next!
September 12-22 & September 26 - October 6: Adventure in Iceland with Smithsonian Journeys
***Please note: Sometimes there are unforeseen changes in the experts/guides on these trips due to illness or other scheduling needs that are out of my control. But I am currently under contract to travel on the above scheduled trips and will do my absolute best to keep to the plan!
While in Patagonia, the group also visited Magdalena Island to say hello to Chile’s largest nesting site for Magellanic penguins! Despite our excitement, they were entirely unbothered.
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