The Corsican two-thousanders
- Sostremetries publishes the first topographically accurate list of all summits above 2,000 metres in Corsica.
A group of five Catalan topographers, known as Sostremetries, has drawn up a new list of summits higher than 2,000 metres on the island of Corsica. Unlike traditional lists, this is the first list based on objective metric criteria (altitude, prominence and isolation) complemented by highly accurate topographical measurements on the ground.
With the validation of these two basic criteria, the island of Corsica has, as of this autumn, the first rigorous list of 99 summits.
Sostremetries 2024 Campaign
This year, the team has had the technical support of Emlid, Mendilur and Aplitop, which has provided them with state-of-the-art topographic instruments and calculation software. In addition to the mountain textile material provided by Montanyà.
The members of the Sostremetries expedition carried out a thorough pre-study based on LiDAR technology recently published by the Institut National de l'Information géographique et forestière (IGN France). This pre-study made it possible to safely include and discard a large number of the summits on the list.
Some of these required more precise field measurements, which Sostremetries carried out between August and October 2024. Specifically, three field campaigns were necessary, 8 days in August, 5 in September and 5 in October, to complete a total of 65 measurements between summits and cols, essential to calculate prominences and determine which summits deserve to be part of the list and which do not.
Finally, in the office these last few weeks, the results of the post-processing calculations have produced the figure of 99 summits, all of them higher than 2000 m above sea level (above the mean sea level of Ajaccio), a relief marked by a minimum of 30 m of prominence and a minimum isolation of 300 m.
Background in other regions
In December 1995, the International Union of Mountaineering Associations (UIAA) published the first official list of the 212 summits over 3,000 metres in the Pyrenees in its bulletin No. 152. To appear on the UIAA list, four requirements had to be met: the peak had to be at an altitude of 3000 m or more, have a minimum prominence of 10 m, have a name and appear on a map or in a guidebook. The latest technological advances in cartography have made it possible to dispense with the last two requirements, which are now ephemeral and do not respond to any technical need. Fourteen years later, the group of mountaineers known as the Ghostbusters was born and began to revise the UIAA list using hiking GPS receivers and considering the only two technically essential rules, altitude and prominence. These devices are accurate to within 3 metres at best, but this has already allowed them to resolve some of the most glaring inconsistencies in the UIAA list.
This is where Sostremetries comes in. Most of the mountains in the Pyrenees had never been measured directly on the ground or had never been measured with centimetric precision. Armed with professional topographic instruments, the group of engineers has the ability to resolve the most difficult uncertainties and certify the altitude of all the peaks they measure, thus certifying two new summits above 3000 metres such as Pico de Arnales with 3001.37 m and more than enough prominence (10 m in the Pyrenees) in the 2022 campaign, and Pico Inferior de Gías with 3000.59 m and a prominence of 13.47 m in the 2023 campaign.
