Devil's Tower. Nature miracle

WONDERS OF NATURE
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Devil's Tower. Nature miracle

Wonders of nature

In the northwest of the United States, in the heart of the Great Plains, not far from the low Black Hills covered with pines, there is an amazing mountain. Its appearance is mysterious, similar either to a mighty fortress tower, or to a monstrous stump. Her absolutely illogical appearance in the middle of the plains stretching for hundreds of kilometers is also mysterious.

The Indians who hunted in the local forests believed that a fierce deity lives on top of a gigantic cliff, which at times becomes angry with the entire human race and decides to destroy it. Then the demon begins to dance and beat the drum, the sound of which rumbles through the district like thunder, causing a thunderstorm. And black clouds are gathering in the sky in order to destroy all life with fiery arrows of lightning. Only the fear that the heavenly fire can incinerate him himself makes the evil demon stop the magical dances.

The legend heard from the Indians prompted the pale-faced settlers who came to these places to give the mountain the expressive name Devils Tower, that is, the Devil's Tower. Lightning, indeed, often strikes its flat top, because on a vast plain in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the Devil's Tower is the only such object. Its ribbed truncated cone rises almost four hundred meters above the river flowing nearby and is visible on clear days for one hundred and sixty kilometers. At the base, the diameter of this giant basalt rock reaches three hundred meters, and in the upper part it decreases to eighty-four meters.

Devil's Tower

The unusual appearance of the Devil's Tower, quite naturally, aroused the imagination of the people who saw it, and many tales and legends were composed by the Indians both about the rock itself and about the legendary events associated with it. Paid tribute to the exotic natural scenery and modern filmmakers. So, in the Hollywood sci-fi thriller "Contacts of the Third Kind" it is here that an alien rocket ship lands.

However, for geologists, the origin of the basalt cone is not a mystery. Fifty million years ago, when the territory of the Great Plains was covered by the sea and powerful strata of sediments were deposited at its bottom, at the place where the Devil's Tower is now, a molten mass of magma intruded into these sedimentary rocks from the depths. Having parted the sandstones, shales and limestones that made up the seabed, the magma solidified before reaching the surface, in the form of a columnar basalt body. Scientists call such bodies stocks.

After millions of years, the sea receded, and the processes of erosion gradually destroyed the cover of softer sedimentary rocks, leaving a mighty stock to show off in the open. The basalts of which it is composed, during the cooling, turned into picturesque vertical formations, similar to hexagonal pillars. Similar polygonal prisms can be seen in other places where basalts occur. Of these, for example, the gigantic dam Bridge of the Giants in Ireland or the high coastal cliffs of the Kuril Islands are composed.

But the stem of the Devil's Tower rising hundreds of meters, involuntarily capturing the eye in the middle of an endless plain, is an extremely majestic and unique sight. Of course, even the strongest rocks cannot eventually resist the forces of erosion, and pieces of faceted columns gradually separate from the top of the rock and fall down, forming a gentle hill at its base. But the main part of the tall stone cylinder is still a spectacular stone "sheaf" of smooth basalt "ears" with sheer walls. Climbing it and especially going down is not an easy task even for experienced climbers equipped with cutting-edge equipment. In any case, the first climber who managed to storm the Devil's Tower had to be removed from the top with the help of a helicopter.

The gigantic tower has been widely popular for more than two hundred years. Drawings and engravings with her image, and later photographs of this natural miracle, bypassed all geographical publications and geology textbooks. And travelers who crossed the northern part of the United States certainly sought to see her mighty silhouette and carry away a piece of basalt, picked up at its foot, as a souvenir. Her attractive power seems inexplicable. After all, there are rocks in the States that are even stranger in shape, moreover, located in picturesque mountainous areas or in an exotic environment of desert landscapes. But for some reason, neither the enchanted stone city of Monument Valley, nor the bizarre remnant rocks in the canyons of Colorado arouse such interest among tourists.

Only after parting with a mighty cliff, flying over the ocean and sorting through impressions in your memory, do you begin to understand what is the matter here. The destruction of rocks on the surface of the Earth often leads to the emergence of mountains, rocks and hills of unusual shape. And for many centuries people have admired the bizarre and fabulous view of cones and towers carved by erosion from soft tuffs or limestones, and the fantastic figures and pillars that it gnaws into hard sandstones.

But no matter how picturesque the "stone forests" of Cappadocia and Madagascar, the castles of Meteora or the round caps of the islands of Halong Bay, these are just charming landscapes, nothing more. You can admire and admire them, but soon new impressions will be relegated to the background, and then the memories of the beauty of these landscapes will be completely erased from memory. Quite another thing is the cyclopean buildings, created jointly by long-suffering surface processes and the frantic, frenzied fury of the boiling hot bowels of our planet.

At the sight of them, there is respectful admiration and a slight shock from some kind of physical sensation of the immense titanic power of those forces that lurk for the time being in the hot possessions of Pluto and, breaking free, freeze with giant black guns, as if ready to engage in battle with thunderclouds. . And no traveler will ever forget the stern grandeur of the Devil's Tower, exposing its rough ribbed sides to thunderstorms and winds in the vast expanses of the American Great Plains.

Author: B.Wagner

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