Qualla: Ngga Pulu

Ngga Pulu: Introduction

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1936, a Dutch geologist named Jean Jacques Dozy stood on a summit in the Carstensz range and looked down at everything. Beneath his boots lay Ngga Pulu, then the highest point of New Guinea and, by extension, the highest summit between the Himalaya and the Andes. For centuries, perhaps millennia, this had been the tallest place on the entire Australia-New Guinea continent. Ninety years later, the ice has retreated so far that Ngga Pulu has lost its crown to a nearby peak. The mountain did not shrink. The glacier that made it tall simply melted away.

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Ngga Pulu: The Only Name That Survived

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Among the peaks of Mount Carstensz, Ngga Pulu is the one summit with a genuine indigenous name. The others carry the residue of colonial naming: Carstensz from a Dutch captain who sighted glaciers near the equator in 1623 and was laughed at in Europe for claiming to have seen sno...

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Ngga Pulu: The Measurement Problem

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 5 December 1936, Anton Colijn, Jean Jacques Dozy, and Frits Wissel crossed the Northwall Firn and stood on the summit of Ngga Pulu. Their barometric measurements put it somewhere near 4,862 meters, though Australian surveyors in 1973 would later establish that the 1936 instrum...

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Ngga Pulu: The Climb and the Climbers After

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After Colijn's party came a long gap. Harrer's expedition in 1962, followed by a Japanese-Indonesian team in 1964. A British climber named Dick Isherwood made the first ascent of the high north face alone in September 1972, a solo push up a wall of unstable ice and equatorial sno...

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Ngga Pulu: When a Mountain Loses Its Ice

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Australian scientific expeditions of 1971 to 1973 began measuring what time and warming were doing to these rare equatorial glaciers. By the year 2000, every glacier on New Guinea outside the immediate Carstensz area had vanished. Puncak Trikora, east of here, lost its icefie...

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Ngga Pulu: What Is Ending

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Scientists monitoring the retreat estimate that all remaining New Guinea glaciers may disappear somewhere between 2020 and 2030. When they do, the Carstensz area will become a geography of rock only, ending a history that runs back thousands of years to when the last ice age fill...

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