Tuesday 14 January 2020

Would You Visit A River,

with no water?


well that is what tourists do in Russia, when they visit Big Stone River in Taganai Park, in the southern Ural Mountains, spanning 6 km long, this gigantic conglomeration of boulders starts off as several small “streams” with and average width of 20 meters that later join to form a large stone river with an average width of 200 meters (in some places up to 700 meters),

photograph Alexander Petrov, scientists believe that it is the result of a glacier breaking off from the higher peaks of the Taganai over 10,000 years ago and flowing down into the valleys, global warming came along, the ice melted and the rocks/boulders were left where they were, 

as an aside the rocks are aventurine, a type of quartz,

the layer of boulders, which has not moved an inch in thousands of years, some of which weigh up to 10 tonnes, is between 4 and 6 meters deep, which makes it almost impossible for vegetation other than lichens to grow in the “river”, a river without water, who would have thought it?


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