Taking the milk home on your donkey across the Asian Steepe - Science Fieldwork photos

Taking the milk home across the steppe of Central Asia. A bit of fieldwork, rocks, views, and life in the high mountains...

Sometimes fieldwork takes you to crazy places. Sometimes you wake up, leave the tent and think that you are the luckiest person on Earth and other days, perhaps if you ate too much fermented mare's milk in the yurt the night before, you wish you dead. Today however was a good day. Work and nature and life all converged.

This photo shows the vastness of the steppe of Central Asia - part of the third pole, the highest land on earth. Here a young boy rides his donkey with a jug full of milk (perhaps yak), and his dogs (to protect him from wolves) running by his side. I love the clouds and how huge this landscape is. The dog later came up to me and licked my hand, but there are big and not so different from wolves themselves.

There is a bit of fieldwork here too since these were taken during fieldwork (i.e. geology photos).

Here you can see some blocky looking deposits, in this case a glacial moraine, or till next to the "person". This deposit formed from glaciers now up in the mountains behind transporting materials down to this location when it was a bit cooler here, likely in the past 17,000 to 25,000 years before present. The valley is really incised here since this was deposited. What is causing this - likely the collision of the Indian and Eurasian Plates. Tectonics!

Another view of the moraine that is composed of till here. Note the different coloured rocks that the "clasts" are and the different colour of the fine-grained material (called a matrix - like the movie, the thing holding everything together). This matrix here is a reddish coloured clay and is found between all of the rock cobbles and boulders (the "clasts"

I like when the photos turn sepia when they get above 7000 m.

Shameless dog and yurt photo because, well, it is awesome. Cool red door too.

For those of you that like a nice up close photo of rocks (here's looking at you @solominer, @mountainwashere, @Sooflauschig, @geopolis and many others), we can see there are a bunch of interesting things we can observe in this photo that helps us better understand the geologic context and history here. 1) it is part of the till - big (>2 m diameter block - subrounded from transport in the glacial system). 2) it has in places a surface of patina, or a desert polish/varnish, i.e. it is getting weathered in situ. 3) it is covered with orange lichen, that takes a long time to grow, sometimes only millimeters per year so it has been here awhile - likely thousands of years. 4) there are fine veins (in white) more or less subparallel crossing this block.

Can anyone else see anything else that can help us better understand the nature of this block and it's history?

Since I am a minnow, sharing my photos is a good way to reach the greater world so I submitted the top photo to the daily photo challenge by @czechglobalhosts (feel free to upvote there too if you like my photos):
https://steemit.com/travel/@czechglobalhosts/7-world-s-continents-photo-challenge-asian-sunday-week-38-the-absolute-winner-takes-200-sbd#@snowyknight/re-czechglobalhosts-7-world-s-continents-photo-challenge-asian-sunday-week-38-the-absolute-winner-takes-200-sbd-20180610t154925135z

Keep exploring....

#photography #nature #beauty #geology #asia

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Original photos - text.

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