Pamir Mountains

The Pamir Mountains form a dense knot of high ranges in Central Asia, centered on Tajikistan and reaching into Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, China and Pakistan, long known as the "roof of the world" for their concentration of peaks above 7,000 meters, including Ismoil Somoni Peak, the range's highest point at about 7,495 meters. The Pamir sits at the point where several major mountain systems, including the Tian Shan, the Karakoram, the Kunlun and the Hindu Kush, converge, a result of its position within the Alpine-Himalayan orogenic belt raised by the ongoing collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates. That collision continues to drive rapid uplift and makes the Pamir one of the most seismically active mountain regions on Earth, its crust still visibly shortening and thickening today. The range holds some of the largest glaciers outside the polar regions, including the roughly 77-kilometer-long Fedchenko Glacier, the longest glacier in Central Asia and one of the longest outside the polar regions. This entity documents the Pamir Mountains specifically as a geological formation, a still-actively-uplifting orogenic knot at the convergence of the Tian Shan, Karakoram, Kunlun and Hindu Kush ranges.