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Puncak Jaya
Oceania's highest summit, an equatorial glacier peak in New Guinea
Puncak Jaya, also called the Carstensz Pyramid, is the highest mountain in Oceania and the loftiest island peak on Earth, a sheer wall of limestone rising to 4,884 metres in the central highlands of Indonesian Papua on the island of New Guinea. Improbably for a mountain almost on the equator, it carried glaciers into the present century - the last tropical ice in the Pacific - though they are now nearly gone. Its remote, technical summit is the hardest of the Seven Summits to reach.
The peak is the crest of the Sudirman Range, part of the highlands thrown up where the Australian and Pacific plates collide along New Guinea's spine. Its summit rock is marine limestone, lifted from an ancient seabed, and its north face is a steep climb on solid rock that sets it apart from the snow plods of the other continental high points. The small glaciers that clung to the summit area for thousands of years have retreated dramatically with warming and may disappear entirely within years, erasing a rare equatorial record of the ice ages.
The Dutch explorer Hendrik Albert Lorentz reported the snows in 1909, but the summit was not climbed until 1962, by an expedition led by the Austrian Heinrich Harrer. Access has long been tightly controlled - the mountain sits beside the vast Grasberg mine, one of the world's largest gold and copper operations, and within a region of political sensitivity - making permits difficult and the peak the rarest tick on the Seven Summits list. The highlands around it are home to Indigenous Papuan peoples.