What is "Isolation" and "Prominence" in mountain terms?
When I was browsing through the wikipedia page of the Denali mountain, I came across some piece of information.
Refer the screenshot below.
What does the term Prominence and Isolation mean?
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Prominence
Is it's height above the surrounding ground (so the ground level is x height above sea level, the mounting is y height above sea level, it's Prominence = y -x)
Isolation
Is the distance between it and the nearest point at the same height.
This is all based on the "footprint" on a map of a peak. This can be straight forward, or it can be very complicated.
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Isolation and prominence are the two key criteria to classify a peak as an independent mountain.
To understand the meaning I like the visualization from the German Wiki where
- "Dominanz" means isolation and
- "Schartenhöhe" means prominence:
Isolation is the distance to the next point with the same height (radius) of a higher mountain. So the nearest higher mountain seen from B is A, see the distance marked as "Dominanz".
Prominence is the difference from the peak to the next key col to which you have to descend at least to be able to reach a higher peak. So from summit B you have to descend at least to the col between B-C, therefore the marked "Schartenhöhe". The col between B-B' is not relevant because B is the higher peak.
This post was sourced from https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/a/9664. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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