First published in 1984, this volume and its companion relate to the work of a group of 70 scientists from Britain, China, Pakistan, Switzerland and the USA who visited the highest mountains in the world during the summer of 1980 to conduct a series of inter-related studies. Supported by the leading learned societies and professional institutions in Britain, China and Pakistan, and by government agencies in these countries, the International Karakoram Project was an expedition that fused several individual topics in the earth sciences into a unified and single study of the world"s most chaotic, unstable landform. The whole project was promoted as the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Geographical Society. This volume details many of the techniques, systems, instrumentation and methods of analysis used on the Project, whilst Volume 2 concentrates on the results obtained by the scientists during the course of the Project.