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North Caucasian mountains. Or not mountains?
However, not all so simple. There is a great temptation to suspect the man-made origin of the many stones found literally everywhere. The most thankless thing is the study of geology from photographs. No one is immune from this mistake, and it is possible to establish the truth, often only through direct research, or as they say: “on the ground” or “in the field”.
Planic Slit
Once I had the opportunity to write an article about an amazingly beautiful place in the north of the Caucasus - the Plancheskaya gap. Plancheskiy rocks (Golden stones, Planchenskiy, Crimean) - are widely known in tourist and mountaineering circles: they gained particular popularity in the early - mid-70s. It was a boom in the development of mountain tourism in Krasnodar and the Kuban. Rock preparation was required for the summer mountain hikes. Gold stones also became a necessary rock testing ground. Several generations of mountain tourists, speleologists, rock climbers grew up here, improving their skills. Rocks Golden stones hang over the left side of the Afips River valley, 1 km south of the Krymskaya Polyana and Plannichesky Rocks, between the village of Krepost and the village of Plancheskaya Shchel.
Actually, it is difficult to name them as rocks, since there are no mountain mineral aggregates, such as granite, basalt or diorite. They are built of armored sandstones. Stretching from west to east for 300 m, they vary both in height (10-22 m) and in the degree of difficulty for novice climbers.
Promotional video:
Anyone who first learns about the existence of this place immediately appears in their mind's eye a view of a harsh stone fortress in the mountains, they recall Zhilin and Kostylin, highlanders, abreks, and everything that we know about the Caucasian war of the nineteenth century from the literary works of the classics. I, too, certainly wanted to find the fortress, or its ruins, after which the village got its name. And you know … At first glance, it seems that there are traces of manual processing of stones in this area:
Photo by Elena Metlitskaya.
Photo by Elena Metlitskaya.
As you know, the nature of the girl is capricious, and intolerates right angles, edges and edges. She tries in every possible way to smooth and round them. Nevertheless, she often generates them herself; for the sake of later turning into shapeless lumps. And in order to determine for sure the origin of stone formations, it is not enough to study them from photographs. You can't do without a visit to the site and a detailed study.
Therefore, in order to put an end to the question of the origin of many plates and blocks, a great many of which are located in the Planic Gorge, an expedition was organized by the AISPIK Internet channel, which included not only amateur researchers, but also professional scientists, experts in areas of geology, soil science and geophysics. The results of the research will be followed by the story.
I believe that no one will blame us for the fact that going on a hike, we were full of bright hopes for a sensational discovery. And no wonder. See what information, for example, official sources contain about this place:
The main phrase here: - "… Serf:" along the natural fortress on the mountain, located within the boundaries of this village. " Of course, such a definition reasonably causes bewilderment and a smile. Natural fortresses, like "natural airplanes", do not exist. But the formations from rocks, which look like man-made ones, quite exist for themselves.
And one of the results of the expedition was the final conclusion about the complete non-involvement of man in the creation of blocks and plates of the correct geometric shape, which so much inflame the imagination of tourists who saw them with their own eyes. The thing is that a person is used to looking for analogies wherever he appears. And this method plays a cruel joke with us, misleading.
But in order to find out the truth, you need to be prepared for disappointment. After all, it is better to be convinced of the erroneousness of your judgments, admit that you are wrong, and go further along the right path. This is better than indulging yourself with illusions and being delusional ad infinitum. Looking ahead, I will say that significant discoveries were made by our expedition. But first about the "fortified plates and blocks."
In order to understand how such miracles are born, a small excursion into the Geological Encyclopedia is enough. And we cannot do without an official version of the origin of the Caucasus Mountains. Here is a summary of this:
In principle, I personally have no special claims to this information, with the exception of dates, of course. There can be no question of tens of millions of years. The Caucasus Mountains are very young, their formation continues to this day, and in terms of geological structure they are completely heterogeneous.
A simple example: Next to a mine located in the mountains, we see heaps of rock extracted by miners from the bowels. What is it?
Waste dumps.
Are they mountains, or not mountains? Common sense dictates that dumps, no matter who poured them, miners or were the results of a rampant natural disaster, cannot be considered mountains. Nevertheless, modern geologists stubbornly call the Caucasus Mountains everything that lies between the Black and Caspian Seas. They interfere in one basket and Elbrus, consisting of bedrock igneous rocks, and the spurs of the North Caucasus, which have nothing to do with tectonics, and cannot have.
It is necessary to separate the grains from the chaff, and not to lump everything together. The North Caucasus is a load of sedimentary rocks: - clay, sand and lime. Simply put, these are the fossilized remains of a water-mudflow of unprecedented strength, which buried a plain under itself, located at a depth of two hundred meters. And this mudflow took place not millions of years ago, but just recently.
Prince Grigory Gagarin, in his 1847 album "Picturesque Caucasus", captured amazing landscapes:
The Black Sea coast. Adygeis descended from the mountains.
The Black Sea coast. Dashing Circassians go for prey.
And here is what the Ossetian aul looked like in a photograph of the early twentieth century:
There is no need to even look for such evidence. Almost all views of the North Caucasus only confirm the immutable: a little over a hundred years ago, the "mountains" looked like the remains of a giant mudflow, which even failed to become covered with vegetation. These places were inhabited by humans quite recently, and the history of the North Caucasian settlements confirms this. There are no "antiquities" here. The oldest settlements and villages were founded in the second half of the nineteenth century, but there are only a few of them. Basically, everything that was built was built by settlers, mostly Cossacks, already at the beginning of the twentieth century. The question arises: - What happened here before?
Let at least one of the candidates and doctors try to clearly answer a simple question: - Why did the Cossacks of Ataman Markov successfully mastered the territories of the polar Kolyma and Chukotka in the middle of the seventeenth century, and the accessible and favorable for life North Caucasus remained deserted until the beginning of the twentieth century? After all, this contradicts elementary logic, because a person will never begin to develop land “in the middle of nowhere”, having under his nose huge territories suitable for agriculture and strategically profitable.
There is no answer to this question. But everything falls into place, if we take into account the version that in fact the North Caucasus was not suitable for life quite recently, at a time when the underground was already working in London. But we do not know anything about the events that could lead to this state of affairs. Meanwhile, there are sufficient grounds to assert that the "mountains" of the North Caucasus were reclaimed in the first half of the nineteenth century, therefore they were mastered in the next subsequent period. Otherwise, it is impossible to rationally explain the paradox of the earlier development of Chukotka, and not the Caucasus.
During the expedition, we examined in detail the vegetation of the Planck and Red Rocks, the valleys of the Belaya, Kurdzhips, Dakh, Afips and adjacent gorges, and nowhere we came across old trees. Those large trunks of oaks, hornbeams and lindens, which may suggest their "thousand-year" age, in fact, are not. Linden and hornbeam grow rather quickly, and their sixty-year-old trunks seem ancient to tourists.
Oaks are a special subject for research. The large trunks of romance are usually called millennial, however … The elementary counting of annual rings on the cuts of such oak trees is very sobering, and brings lyricists back to earth.
Having counted the annual rings on the cut of this "millennial" oak, we were convinced that in fact its age does not exceed three hundred years. Moreover, his living conditions in the first hundred years were radically different from those of today. It turns out that in the middle of the nineteenth century there was a certain event, as a result of which the oak sharply slowed down its growth, and later "recovered" and began to grow even better than before. From this it is possible to make a reasonable assumption that initially the tree could grow somewhere else, and was brought by a mudflow, where it was "okaylem", and continued life in a new place. This also happens, and quite often.
But it is not only with the help of the dendrochronological dating method that it is possible to establish the time of the origin of life in the North Caucasus. To help us, and wild lichens growing on stones.
For reference:
Lichens are symbiotic organisms consisting of 3 components - mycobiont (fungus), blue-green algae and nitrogen-fixing bacteria. They are widespread in the modern biosphere in all physical and geographical zones.
Lichens have several ecological types - epilithic, that is, growing only on stones, epiphytic - on plants, some species specialize only in animal bones, others in metal, others in minerals and rocks of a certain composition, etc. In addition, according to the morphology of the thallus or thallus, lichens are divided into scale (film), crustal, scaly, leafy and bushy.
Lichenometry - the use of lichens to date rock surfaces - was first proposed by the Austrian botanist Ronald Beschel. As soon as the rocky surface is exposed, spores of various organisms fall on it. Most of them die without meeting suitable conditions for life. However, the spores of some lichens germinate and form thalli, which increase every year. By measuring the size of the largest thalli, and knowing the annual growth, it is possible to plot the increase in thallus diameter and, accordingly, calculate the time of outcrop of the rock. The growth rate of different types of lichens is different, so it varies from 0.6 to 40 mm. per year, and their life expectancy varies from 80 to 600 years.
It is not known which of the scientists observed the growth of lichens for six hundred years, but in general, it is quite possible to trust these figures. For example, when studying the megalithic moai statues on Easter Island, it was found that three species of lichens grew on them at a rate of 12, 17 and 8 mm per year, respectively. Then the largest diameter of lichen rosettes on a natural volcanic rock was measured, and it turned out that these species make it possible to calculate the age up to 800 years.
Only now, the speed and duration of their growth is very different depending on the species and place of growth. Only in the area of the AISPIK 2018 expedition there are about 80 species of various lichens. What unites them is that most of them are relatively fast-growing, because their range is located in a warm and humid climatic zone adjacent to the subtropical belt.
This lichen is more than four hundred years old, provided that it grew in the arctic tundra. But we made measurements in the Caucasus and, accordingly, the age of such thallus must be halved at once, if not more.
And again we come to the age of the North Caucasian foothills of about two hundred years. So what happened before? This is how a school textbook describes the structure of the Caucasus:
In fact, it's still much easier. See what we find on the tops of the "mountains":
This is a piece of petrified clay that fell from above into the gorge. The holes in it have nothing to do with human activities and even natural erosion. Just a crack went through the places where shells of various types were in the clay. From them the emptiness remained. The organic matter was completely decomposed, and the valves, which themselves are calcium formations, left cavities in the core of the frozen clay. But not only sea shells were captured by the mudflow, but also ordinary pebbles. Here's a prime example of a mining conglomerate:
Conglomerate (Latin conglomerate - crowded, accumulated, collected, compacted) in geology, a cemented coarse rock, more than half consisting of rounded fragments - pebbles and boulders.
Translated into "understandable" language, these are the same stone balls that so excite the minds of some lovers of everything mysterious and mysterious. There is nothing mystical about them, and during the expedition we found hundreds of such balls of various sizes, and thousands of traces left by them in monolithic layers of petrified clay:
Concretions stored on the territory of the Alexander Fortress in Ust-Labinsk, Krasnodar Territory.
In addition, we found hundreds of ammonites (extinct marine molluscs) that did not even have time to petrify! What kind of millions of years, and the Jurassic period?
There were also a lot of mussels, albeit petrified, but still quite modern to us, and at an altitude of more than a hundred meters:
And here is more evidence of fossilized footprints of marine fauna. These are not hieroglyphs, no, and not ancient runes. These are footprints left by a special species of sea worm, burrowing its passages in the bottom of sandy coastal shoals. And the "comb" resembling tiny dunes, on the surface is exactly the same as on the bottom of the seas and lakes at the very edge of the surf.
What are the representatives of marine fauna and sedimentary rocks doing on the peaks of the Caucasus? Science claims that earlier these peaks were the bottom of the Tethys Ocean, and then the bottom rose, and the water sharpened the stone for a hundred after hundred thousand years until deep gorges were formed.
And I say that the water sharpened unstable rocks, and soft clay, and everything about everything took her several hundred years. All the so-called rocks in the North Caucasus are loess-like loams, sandy-clayey, sometimes carbonate dolomites, shales (derivatives of red, white and blue alluvial clay), continental and marine deposits. All! The tale is over.
It's all just clay …
Yes, clay. Or clay with sand. And it is not completely crystallized everywhere. In many places, it continues to be soft and pliable:
Dante gorge. Goryachy Klyuch, Krasnodar Territory.
When the clay is completely fossilized, historians will tell our grandchildren about the hard work of thousands of stonecutters who carved steps with bronze chisels in the hardest rock mass. Exactly as we are now being told how the dolmens were built.
Continued: Part 28
Author: kadykchanskiy