A Mountain Carved by Ice
Rising to 2,543 meters, Uludağ is the highest peak in western Anatolia and a feature visible from the Sea of Marmara. While today it is a popular center for winter sports, its upper slopes hold clear evidence of a much colder past. During the Pleistocene epoch, specifically the Last Glacial Maximum, an ice cap covered the mountain's summit. This ice fed valley glaciers that flowed down its northern flanks, scouring the landscape and leaving behind a distinct set of landforms that are still visible today.
The mountain's geology, composed primarily of hard, crystalline rocks like granite and gneiss, perfectly preserved the scars left by the moving ice. Hikers above the current tree line can find U-shaped valleys, glacially-carved basins known as cirques, and small alpine lakes called tarns. Surfaces of the bedrock show glacial polish and long, parallel scratches called striations, created when rocks embedded in the base of the glacier were dragged across the underlying stone. The evidence is the moraines—ridges of unsorted rock and debris (till) deposited at the glacier's edges. On Uludağ, these terminal and lateral moraines are found down to elevations of 1,800 to 1,900 meters, at the lowest extent of the ice.