Joe Simpson Touching The Void

In the movie Touching the Void, it starts off by two people named Joe Simpson and Simon Yates that go to Peru to climb the Siula Grande Mountains. The ranges of those mountains haven’t been climbed and those who have tried to climb them, failed. Simpson and Yates tried to climb the glacier even though they knew the risks. A glacier is made up of fallen snow that has been accumulated throughout the years and it forms into a large and thick ice masses. It’s where the snow remains that have been remained in a certain are for long periods of time and it transforms into ice. The type of glacier that they climbed was a confined glacier. The glacier was a depositional, because when Simpson was walking towards the campsite where Yates was, he had to pass through the moraines, where it’s a formed accumulation of glacial debris in which consist of soil and rocks.
The glacier had many areas where there were crevasses. In fact, Simpson was the one who actually fell into one. Crevasse is a deep open crack in the thick ice on a mountain, which are caused by stress by the glacier flow, they maybe in a few feet long or sometimes miles long. According to Simpson, he felt that he fell about 150 feet into the crevasse. When Simpson fell into the crevasse, there it was like a deep hole that had no way out, except for the hole that he made when he fell into it. But when he

was in there, there was an endless supply of ice that he was surrounded by and the ice was smooth and you can see the crystals that the ice formed throughout the years. When Yates and Simpson needed to take a rest they would make a glacier cave, in which they would rest for a few hours to hydrate and get some strength back and keep moving to the next stop. A glacier cave is formed in or under a glacier and this happened on day two.
There was also an esker, which is a meandering, water-deposited sediment ridge that forms within a stream channel. Where the floor can be bedrock, sediment or ice. This is where Simpson was trying to get water from, but mostly the water carried rocks and debris; but Simpson was still drinking the water because he was dehydrated and needed to maintain his body moving. The mountain also had horns on the top, which would mean that it was in the mountain peak. It’s usually in a typical a pyramid shape. In the movie, there was also a Drumlin. A drumlin is an elongated ridge of glacier sediment sculpted ice moving over the bed of a glacier. It looks like a blunt-ended canoe that contained few snow and was mostly composed of rocks. We can see this in the beginning of the movie when they give the full view of the mountain. There were also kettle holes in the movie and blocks of ice that are separated from the main glacier form those. Once the ice blocks melted, then the place where they landed where filled with water.
Glacier also moved large masses of rocks throughout the mountain and those were found on the way down from the mountain.

The rocks that are round shape are the ones that move the most, and I could tell that most of the rocks when getting closer to campsite where round rocks, and that would probably mean that the glacier was dragging the rocks towards the bottom, since they are easier to move around. Some of the bedrock rocks had striations, it’s where a glacier moves across the underlying rocks and the process of abrasion wears it away the fragments of the rock held in the ice and it scraps the rock on the

surface.
The larger rocks make large deep scratch marks behind them. The scratch marks straight parallel lines that signify the direction the movement if the ice that it went through. We can see this when Simpson was climbing down the mountain and trying to reach their campsite where Yates and Richard were. When a valley is shaped in ‘U’ shape, it means that the glacier will pass and when the valley is shaped as a ‘V’ it means that water must be passing. But in the movie the valley was shaped in a ‘U’ shape and that would mean that it was the glacier that was going to pass through or already passed.
Once, Simpson managed to get out of the crevasse, he had to manage with a broken leg to try to get to where Yates was. But on his way there, he had many problems; one of his problems was that he encountered was powdered snow. Powder snow is a fine dry particles produced by the grinding, crushing, or disintegration of a solid substance. In which, it made it difficult for Simpson to keep moving; snowfall was accumulating and it forms a new glacial ice.