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.
Dating the Great Thaw
The rock debris left by the glaciers provides a direct way to date the ice's retreat. Scientists use a technique called cosmogenic surface exposure dating on boulders found on the moraines. By measuring the concentration of specific isotopes, such as Beryllium-10, which are produced when cosmic rays strike the rock surface, researchers can calculate how long a boulder has been exposed to the sky since the ice that carried it melted away.
Studies on Uludağ's moraines pinpoint the final retreat of its glaciers to approximately 12,000 to 11,700 years ago. This timing is significant because it coincides with the end of the Younger Dryas, an abrupt, short-lived return to near-glacial conditions that interrupted the general warming trend at the end of the last ice age. The data from Uludağ provides a benchmark for this climatic shift in the Eastern Mediterranean, showing exactly when this major cold snap ended and the modern, warmer Holocene epoch began in the region. Although the mountain receives heavy snowfall today, sometimes up to 4 meters deep, it has no permanent glaciers or ice fields.