You are here
The Southern cliff of Ustyurt.
![The nature Southern cliff of Ustyurt.](https://silkadv.com/sites/default/files/styles/article-teaser/public/1_obl_new_1-min_0.jpg?itok=XxEVr2lD)
![The nature Southern cliff of Ustyurt.](https://silkadv.com/sites/default/files/styles/article-teaser/public/2_999_699-min.jpg?itok=ODshRg2x)
Park tour in Uzbekistan.
“As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of nature - in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing - he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural”
Honore de Balzac.
Gorge tour Uzbekistan.
The Southern cliff of Ustyurt rises above the Karakum Desert and above the northern coast of the ancient bed of the Uzboy. The absolute height of Ustyurt in the southern part in places reaches about 300 meters.
The most common physical characteristics of Ustyurt are clay and clay stony desert with groups of outcrops or separate low calcareous karstic formations, as well as shallow cracks in the soil, downthrown block, local areas of fine crushed stone and - separately - sand. In scientific language, this is formulated as follows: the Ustyurt Plateau is composed of sedimentary rocks of the Neogene.
From the surface - Sarmatian limestones, under which marl, clay, limestone, sandstone, gypsum occur. Geologists subdivide the Ustyurt Plateau into such large structural relief components: Northern Ustyurt tectonic depression (large, smooth depression), Central Ustyurt elevation, South Mangystau Ustyurt depression (system of deflections), Kuanysh Koskalinsky shaft, part of the Aral system, also included parts. and Tahtakayir shaft. In tectonic terms - Ustyurt - part of the Turan, or Scythian Turan, plate.
At the beginning and middle of the Cenozoic epoch, the plateau was the bottom of the ancient Tethys ocean, which existed between the ancient supercontinents Gondwana and Laurasia, divided into two parts in the proto-Pangea continent during the Mesozoic era.
The Ustyurt limestones have many inclusions of shells, and some of their layers are real, and continuous, shell rock. Other witnesses of ancient geological processes - the so-called stone balls, most often partially destroyed, similar to bitten by apples - are iron-manganese spherical concretions, usually formed on the seabed, at great depths.
Authority:
http://big-archive.ru http://geosfera.org
Photos by
Alexander Petrov.