EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

Explanation:   It's cold up here.  We're looking across glacier-carved valleys onto a vista of icefields, arêtes, and cols.  We're in the high country of the Andes Mountains of South America ... more specifically, in Challhuaco Reserve in the Patagonian high country of southern Argentina. 

We've just hiked to Mirador Peak at a modest 1,565 m (about 5200 ft) elevation.  An incredible 360-degree panorama view surrounds us, of endless overlapping glacial valleys, cliffs, stark volcanic peaks, warped and folded geologic layers, glaciated and eroded basalt and pumice strata, everywhere we look.   

See if you can match these landmarks
to the above panorama photo.
(Click on the image for a larger version.)

This is the world of Andean Condors and Black-chested Buzzard-Eagles, soaring on invisible winds below where we stand.  A stiff wind barely ripples the krumholz alpine vegetation (which we will explore in a future EPOW).  

Treeline is several hundred meters below us, where begins a forest of lenga trees (Nothofagus pumilio), one of several species of "southern beech" found in Patagonia.  These are ancient trees that date back to Gondwana, when the continents of the southern hemisphere had yet to divide.  This is indeed an ancient and remarkable land.