Читать книгу Torres del Paine. Chile's Premier National Park and Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park онлайн

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On the trail by Lago Pehoé (Walk 1)

The national park covers an area of some 240,000 hectares, and is roughly delineated by the Chilean-Argentine border and Argentina’s Los Glaciares national park to the north, the Río Zamora and the eastern shore of Lago Sarmiento in the east, the Southern Ice Field to the west, and the Río Serrano and the enormous Bernardo O’Higgins national park to the south. The Cordillera del Paine or Paine massif lies more or less at its centre, slightly separate from and to the east of the main Andes chain – a landscape of vertical granite spires and shattered rocky peaks, which emerge above unspoilt forest, fast-flowing mountain streams, spectacularly coloured lakes and massive glaciers.

Much of the Paine massif constitutes the exposed remnants of a granite laccolith – igneous rock, which was injected into the earth’s crust some 12 million years ago during the Miocene epoch, forcing the surrounding sedimentary rock upwards. An earlier intrusion (a mafic intrusion of monzonite, and later olivine-gabbro) underpins the granite laccolith. Since then the surrounding sedimentary rock has been gradually eroded, leaving the more resistant granite Torres (‘towers’) – along with other peaks such as Fortaleza and Cerro Espada – gloriously exposed. This exposed granite also forms the central portion or band of the Cuernos (‘horns’), while their dark, spiky upper bands constitute the shattered remnants of the surrounding sedimentary strata. The underlying intrusion is only partially exposed.