|
Arabic
Bengali
Chinese
English
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Malay
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese|
WONDERS OF NATURE
Desert Gobi. Nature miracle
The territory of the Gobi occupies the entire southern half of Mongolia, and at the same time grabs a fair part of China. On the maps, it is still listed as "desert", although this is not entirely true. Firstly, there is not so little precipitation in the Gobi: 200-300 millimeters, that is, one and a half times more than it should be in classic desert regions. Raised 900 meters above sea level, it is also distinguished by severe winters, which are not at all typical, for example, for the neighboring Karakum or Kyzylkum. Secondly, the concept of the Gobi includes several areas that are completely different in climate and appearance. No wonder the Mongols say: "We have thirty-three Gobi, and all are different!"
The northern Gobi, which lies south of Ulaanbaatar and reaches the spurs of the Mongolian Altai, is a typical steppe with dense tall grasses, spring tulips, the cheerful whistling of marmots and fat herds grazing in vast expanses. And behind the eastern tip of the Altai Mountains, in the so-called Trans-Altai Gobi, stony dry wormwood steppes and semi-deserts with occasional wells and dry riverbeds predominate. There is also the Eastern Gobi, the Dzungarian Gobi, the Gashun Gobi, the Gobi Altai, and all of them have their own appearance, their own character. Here you can find flat plains, and small hills, and high mountain ranges, fresh and salty lakes with reed beds, clear fast rivers in a green frame of poplars and white spots of salt marshes overgrown with purple saltwort. In the steppes of the Eastern Gobi, closer to Manchuria, rise the cones of extinct volcanoes that erupted quite recently, in the XNUMXth century AD. Small, only three hundred meters high, they have retained all the signs of their formidable past: from craters to frozen flows of once hot lava and placers of volcanic bombs on the slopes. But purely desert landscapes in the Gobi are still rare and they are located closer to its southern and western outskirts, next to the real hot deserts of Alashan and Takla-Makan. The Gobi is the kingdom of the sun and wind, spacious plains and low mountains and hills. Only the peaks of the Gobi Altai sometimes rise up to three and a half kilometers. Cloudy days are rare here, and in summer the heat sometimes reaches forty-five degrees. But in winter, clear days bring cold, and the temperature can drop to minus forty! The wind, which almost meets no obstacles in the steppe, is able to roam here in earnest. Sometimes reaching the strength of a hurricane, it raises clouds of dust and sand into the air and brings down terrible sandstorms on settlements and trade caravans. They are especially dangerous in the Dzungarian and Gashun Gobi, where the wind rips roofs off houses, tears the tents of geologists to shreds, overturns and carries away the light yurts of nomads sometimes for three to five kilometers, and individual items, like dressing gowns or carpets - for twenty kilometers. Horses and camels can barely stand in the wind, and then turn their tails to the wind. A stone thrown upwards does not fall vertically down, but at an angle of sixty degrees, landing five to seven meters from the "starting point". In autumn, hurricanes are accompanied by rain and hail, and it happens that huge hailstones, the size of a chicken egg, kill sheep or goats on the spot. Hard grains of sand carried by a storm can turn clear glass into frosted glass in a week or two, while the wind is raging. And they literally polish the tops of the ridges and separate rocks, giving the rocky hills the most fantastic shape. And it is not surprising that it was in these parts, more precisely, not far from the northern outskirts of the Dzungarian Gobi, that the great geologist, geographer and traveler V. A. Obruchev discovered his famous "Aeolian city", which is not like in any other part of the world. Dzungaria, where this miracle of nature is located, is a desert depression surrounded by impregnable steeps of the Tien Shan and Altai. For thousands of years it served as a link between Central Asia and China: after all, it is here that the only passage between the two great mountain systems is located - the stony and narrow Dzungarian gates. Once the Great Silk Road ran through them, caravans from Samarkand or Khiva to Mongolia, Tibet and to the banks of the Yangtze passed through them for centuries. Fierce Huns and innumerable hordes of Genghis Khan went on campaigns across Dzungaria. To the north of the Dzungarian Gates, at the foot of the Tarbagatay Ridge, in 1906 Obruchev's expedition stumbled upon an unusual area, which at first seemed to geologists to be the ruins of an ancient city. Only a closer acquaintance with the "ruins" showed that their builder (and destroyer too) was ... the wind. And the whole huge "city" is an exceptionally beautiful picture of weathering, grinding and waving of soft rocks: sandstones, marls and clays of pink, gray-yellow and greenish colors. Towers, castles, walls, obelisks, pillars, needles and monuments are spread over an area of several square kilometers, separated by streets, lanes and squares. Spherical stones stick out in the walls, like cannonballs stuck there during the shelling of the city. On the streets, plates of mica glisten in the rays of the sun, like pieces of broken window panes. A complete illusion of a city taken by storm and abandoned by the population is created. But it is useless to conduct excavations in it: there is nothing inside the towers and buildings - only sandstone or marl. The amazing landscape, created by winds and rains and having such a striking resemblance to a fortress built by people, Obruchev called the "Aeolian city" after the Greek god of the wind - Eol. Many of the "structures" of this city had such a fantastic appearance that they received their own names: "sphinx", "bird", "pyramids" and even "sorceress's tower" ... Now, not far from the Aeolian city, there was a railway connecting China with Kazakhstan, and, perhaps, in the near future, everyone who wants to get acquainted with this unique natural phenomenon will be able to fulfill this intention. The bizarre forms of rocks in the foothills of the Tarbagatai, Mongolian and Gobi Altai, naturally, did not go unnoticed by the nomadic Mongols and provided abundant food for popular imagination. Many fairy tales and legends were told in the evenings by old people, sitting in their yurts, surrounded by inquisitive kids. But not every fairy tale is pure fiction. Sometimes the reason for its creation was real events or facts, and then, in accordance with Pushkin's "fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it ...", sometimes incredible, amazing finds are discovered. So the lines of the old Mongolian fairy tale about the dragon turned into a foresight: "... The wounded dragon, flying over the mountains and the steppe, lost strength, fell and died. Its bones went deep into the ground and became stone. There, in the mountains of Nemegatu, now lie the tail and the dragon's hind legs. The head and body fell further for a day and a half of the journey, in the mountains of Tost-Ula. That's how big the terrible dragon was!" Another expedition of Przhevalsky's student, the Russian traveler P.K. Kozlov, at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, discovered in the south of Mongolia, in the very heart of the Gobi, burials of fossil remains of ancient animals. But it was only after the Great Patriotic War that he managed to take seriously the “cemeteries of the Jurassic period” he found. In 1946, the Academy of Sciences sent a large expedition from Moscow to Mongolia led by the prominent paleontologist I. A. Efremov (later a famous science fiction writer). The area of Efremov's work covered the dry intermountain depressions of the Gobi Altai and the Eastern Gobi. Scientists have managed to find and excavate as many as three sites where the remains of ancient dinosaurs of the Mesozoic era, including giant dinosaurs, have been preserved. The value of the find was the exceptionally good preservation of huge skeletons, some of which reached twenty-five meters in length and weighed several tens of tons. In addition, the skeletons of large ancient mammals, crocodiles, sea turtles, as well as shells of mollusks were found. As a result, it was possible to establish that on the site of the Gobi 130 million years ago, at the turn of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, there was a vast marshy lowland bordering on a shallow sea. Giant herds of herbivorous dinosaurs grazed on the damp plain, and their carnivorous relatives followed them, attacking the lagging behind or weakened. The dry hot climate that later settled on the territory of Mongolia and the cessation of mountain building processes contributed to the fact that the skeletons of lizards have survived to this day in a unique state. Many of them were completely buried, and one could easily imagine the appearance of monstrous reptiles. It was not easy to excavate under the scorching rays of the sun, in conditions of lack of water. Sometimes sandstorms hit the camp. Yes, and the process of removing and carrying thirty-forty-kilogram bones was a difficult and difficult task. But the joy of rare luck was stronger than physical deprivation. Indeed, for the first time on the planet, it was possible to find not individual bones or skeletons, but entire cemeteries with dozens, hundreds of buried remains of animals of various species. Here is what Efremov himself said about the excavations: These lines were written on the western burial site, near the slopes of the Mongolian Altai, just near the Nemegetu ridge, which was discussed in the old fairy tale ... Later, two more dinosaur cemeteries were found in the east of Mongolia. Here they managed to dig up a huge skull of a predatory lizard and find a whole cluster of petrified trunks of coniferous trees. In one place, a long range of hills was littered with huge black stone logs up to fifteen meters long and one and a half meters in diameter. The expedition brought to Moscow two and a half tons of valuable finds. In subsequent years, many more discoveries were made in the Gobi cemeteries of the Jurassic pangolins. Now, the giant skeletons, carefully freed from stone, are installed in the Paleontological Museum in Moscow and in the Central Museum of Mongolia in Ulaanbaatar. But the paleontological treasures of the Gobi intermountain basins are not all that this unique region of Central Asia can impress the traveler with. No less interesting are the Gobi Altai mountains themselves. When you see them for the first time, there is a feeling of some implausibility of the landscape. Without any foothills, without gradual ascents, two-kilometer-long masses of mountain ranges suddenly grow out of the flat steppe, as if some giant had scattered gigantic blocks among the desert plains. Gobi Altai is an area of active tectonic activity. Its mountains are growing in height even today. But they do not rise in a continuous array, like the neighboring Mongolian Altai, but in separate blocks-lumps. And some of them rise almost 4000 meters above sea level or 2600 meters above the neighboring Valley of the Lakes. The most spectacular group of mountains is Gurvan-Bogdo (which means in Mongolian "Three deities"). These are the massifs of Ikhe-Bogdo ("Big Deity", 3957 meters), Baga-Bogdo ("Small Deity", 3590 meters) and Artsa-Bogdo ("Juniper Deity", 2453 meters). Strange names arose not by chance. Many centuries ago, the Mongols began to deify these mountains, because more than once or twice, with terrible earthquakes, they terrified and trembled the shepherds who roamed the local steppes. And the people who witnessed the grandiose cataclysms could explain the catastrophes that were taking place in no other way than the wrath of the powerful gods. The strongest, ten-point earthquake (on a twelve-point scale) occurred in the Gobi Altai in 1902. And 55 years later, a new grandiose earthquake shook the mountains and valleys of the Gobi for a month. This is what this terrible catastrophe looked like according to the stories of the surviving eyewitnesses. On the morning of December 4, 1957, from the side of Baga-Bogdo, an underground rumble suddenly sounded, turning into a deafening roar. Underground strikes were like artillery salvos from several thousand guns. They followed one after another in 8-10 seconds. After five such blows, Baga-Bogdo completely disappeared in a huge cloud of red-yellow dust raised by mountain landslides. Half a minute later, Ikhe-Bogdo responded - there was also heard an underground rumble and a deafening roar. The mountain also disappeared in clouds of dust. Soon the dusty clouds that shrouded the mountains joined together and eclipsed the sun. At a hundred paces it was impossible to distinguish white yurts. Only four days later the dust settled a little and the silhouettes of calm mountains appeared from the red-yellow haze. The earthquake brought a lot of destruction. In the village of Bogdo-Ula, a school building collapsed. Fortunately, it was made of wood, and the wreckage did not crush anyone to death, there were only wounded and bruised people. A high wave of water swept along the Tuin-Gol River at the first blows. He broke the ice and roared into the lake. The ground around the lake was covered with gaping cracks. Horror seized the animals. Mountain goats and wild sheep fled from the mountains in panic. They were nailed to the herds of livestock and grazed with them for several days, as if looking for support. Only gradually nature took its toll, and the fugitives one by one began to go back to the mountains. The earthquake covered an area of one million square kilometers. In Ulaanbaatar, five hundred kilometers from Bogdo-Ula, the tremors reached six points. The houses swayed, the plaster crumbled. And in the epicenter zone, the magnitude of the earthquake was eleven points! The entire Gurvan-Bogdo ridge with the mountains of Ikhe-Bogdo and Baga-Bogdo rose by one and a half meters. Large areas of terrain, several kilometers long, turned out to be moved 5-7 meters to the east. The area of the earthquake was dissected by gaping faults. The main cracks chopped off the massif from the north and south. The northern fault of the earth's crust stretched for 350 kilometers, and the southern one - for 220 kilometers. Large blocks of earth fell between parallel cracks by 5-6 meters. The width of such dips reached twenty meters, and the length - hundreds of meters. A large herd of sheep collapsed into one of the faults at the height of the cataclysm. Another fissure stretched between the two main mountains. But it was not gaping, but tightly compressed, and its western wall was thrown up ten meters. Here and there the earth was wrinkled in huge waves, as if a gigantic bulldozer had moved it into mounds twenty meters high and up to a hundred meters long. Only due to the sparsely populated Gobi, the monstrous revelry of the underground elements did not lead to large human casualties. Traces of the Gobi-Altai earthquake have survived to this day. And scientists are studying them, hoping to learn how to predict aftershocks. However, one should not think that all the curiosities of the Gobi belong only to the field of geology. The Gobi is the only region in the world where you can meet the wild Przewalski horse and wild camel. Yes, and kulans (wild donkeys), except for the Gobi, are found only in two or three regions of our planet. But the main decoration of these places is graceful gazelles. The main feeling that you experience when you get to the Gobi is a feeling of boundless space, some kind of amazing freedom. And a person who likes the expanse of the steppes and the bottomless blue of the sky, the rustle of lush grasses and the song of the lark above his head, should go to Mongolia, best of all in the spring, when a multi-colored carpet of flowers is spread to the very horizon, and noisy flocks of birds flock to the shores of lakes turning blue in the spurs of the Khangai and Mongolian Altai. He will inhale the warm wind with his whole chest, enjoy the heady aroma of steppe flowers, listen to the cheerful chirping of birds and admire the long and colorful sunsets. And he will never turn his tongue to call the Gobi - a desert. Author: B.Wagner
Artificial leather for touch emulation
15.04.2024 Petgugu Global cat litter
15.04.2024 The attractiveness of caring men
14.04.2024
▪ Mobile device Samsung SPH-P9000 ▪ Decaffeinated coffee has grown ▪ Wind power will fully provide Brazil with electricity
▪ section of the site RF power amplifiers. Article selection ▪ article Inverted pictures. Encyclopedia of visual illusions ▪ article Who first said: Whoever enters us with a sword will die by the sword? Detailed answer ▪ article Trailer dump truck. Personal transport ▪ article Antenna QUAD for three bands. Encyclopedia of radio electronics and electrical engineering ▪ article Solder... the stove. Encyclopedia of radio electronics and electrical engineering
Home page | Library | Articles | Website map | Site Reviews
www.diagram.com.ua |
We recommend interesting articles Section 
See other articles Section 
Latest news of science and technology, new electronics:
All languages of this page