Large mountains of Asia list. Hills and mountains of Asia. Where is Mount Aconcagua located?

The most grandiose mountain systems in our country stretch from Altai to the Kopetdag for almost 2 thousand kilometers and form powerful natural boundaries on its borders with China and Afghanistan.

It is no coincidence that the southernmost link of the mountains of Central Asia, the Pamir Plateau, is elevated above all others: it is the most complex junction at the junction of two great mountain belts of the planet - the Alpine-Himalayan and Pamir-Chukchi. In the first of them, the greatest elevations gravitate towards this node: the alpine garlands of the Iranian Plateau, right at the junction with the Pamirs, reach heights of more than seven kilometers (up to 7690 meters) in the ridgesHindu Kush; from the southeast, even higher ranges of the Karakoram, Kunlun and Himalayas approach here.

At the same time, the Pamir Plateau also serves as the southwestern section of the Pamir-Chukchi belt, the neighboring links of which, starting from the Gissar-Alai, are located as if backstage, of which each more northern one is shifted to the east. Behind the huge Fergana Basin, the colossal Tien Shan was erected, not much inferior in height to the Pamirs. A separate northeastern link of the Tien Shan is formed by the mountains of the Dzhungar Alatau; Tarbagatai and Saur stand behind them.

The only exceptions to the picture of the latitudinal structure of irregularities are isolated “oblique” ridges like the Fergana and the fan of spurs at the western ends of the Gissar-Alai and Tien Shan. This play of strikes reflected the different directions of tectonic stresses: some were latitudinal, others reflected the oblique orientation of deep faults - along them the western parts of Kunlun and the Himalayas were uplifted, and in our country - Kopet Dag and Mangyshlak. It is no coincidence that large depressions in the relief of the neighboring plains—the Karakum, Kyzylkum, and Chu—extend diagonally to the degree network; this helped to rush to the northwest and the lower reaches of the largest Central Asian rivers. Thus, the listed directions are inherited from the ancient structural plan of the subsoil. Only the Pamirs rear up on the convex bend of the young Alpine folds to the north. The subsoil of the Gissar-Alai and Tien Shan folded back in the Paleozoic within the single Ural-Tien Shan arc, which deviated here to the southeast.

The current height of these mountains is the result of the enormous scale of recent uplifts. They captured both the young structures of the Pamirs and the ancient sections of the Ural-Tien Shan arc. Over 24 million years of the Neogene, the Pamirs were raised by 3400, and over the last million years (during the Quaternary period) by another 700 meters. And the scope and pace of uplifts near the Tien Shan and Gissar-Alai are even greater.

The rising blocks were often crushed, hummocked, or even crushed. Even ancient rigid structures have been corrugated with large bend radii. These bends - shafts and valleys - ran parallel to the strikes of the nearest arc of the Alpine-Himalayan zone. It is this corrugation that accounts for the elongation of the largest Central Asian ridges along the parallels.

The depressions separating the mountains have their own life. Sometimes basins, the bottom of which also rises, only lag behind the growing ridges nearby - this is how the Issyk-Kul and Naryn basins of the Tien Shan behave. But there are cases when the depressions themselves descend, and their bottoms are above sea level only because, as they sag, they are filled with sediment from neighboring mountains. Along the outskirts, these sediments themselves experience collapse - this is how the Fergana, Ili, and South Tajik depressions behave.

The mountains of Central Asia are among the most seismic in the world. In 1887 and 1911, Verny, now Alma-Ata, was destroyed, and in 1902, Andijan. In 1911, an earthquake shook the western Pamirs and caused a landslide that created Lake Sarez. Ashgabat was terribly destroyed in 1948, Garm and Khait in 1949, and Tashkent in 1966. The rapid restoration of both capitals in an earthquake-resistant version showed how it is possible to withstand the elements in the most seismic foothill zones.

These mountains are an important climatic divide, a barrier that has grown on the path of humid western air masses into the interior of the continent. Like mysterious ghosts, snowy ridges are visible through the dusty haze from the sultry desert plains of Turan. But it often happens that they are not visible, and not because the haze is thick, but because of the density of the clouds. The deserts do not receive a drop of rain for months, and the invisible Atlantic moisture, removed from saturation, does not reach the earth. Only when it meets mountain barriers does the air rise, moisture becomes visible and forms lingering fogs, heavy rains and snowfalls at levels above 2-3 kilometers. Humidification increases tenfold from the foothills to the ridges. Glaciers conserve moisture so that it can later be used to feed desert rivers. The water supply of the foothill plains, and with it the irrigation of fields, depends on the replenishment and melting regime of these “ice reservoirs”. Therefore, it is important to study glaciers.

In the mountains of Central Asia they are the longest in the country. “Rivers of Ice” receive ice tributaries. Tree-like glaciers are so characteristic here that they are called Turkestan. Each of their tributaries carries its own lateral moraine to the core, and it begins to accompany the axial moraine of the main glacier. Therefore, median moraines of tree-shaped glaciers usually consist of several parallel embankments and resemble the picture of multi-track railway tracks.

Often you even have to fight with water. During summer showers and when lake dams break through, it happens that mud and stone streams—mudflows—rush to the foot of the mountains. Now entire regions are provided with anti-mudflow service: surveillance is carried out on “suspicious” mountain lakes that may threaten to burst, and barriers are erected along the paths of possible mudflows.

Snow-capped peaks are visible from the streets of almost any major city in Central Asia. For many city residents, these mountains look like an unreal world. But how much attractive power they have for those who have at least once tasted the temptations of mountain tourism! This is a world of amazing natural beauty, one of the cradles of our mountaineering. All the sky-high heights are dominated by seven-thousand-meter peaks - Communism Peak (7495 meters), Victory Peak (7439 meters), Lenin Peak (7139 meters) and Evgenia Korzhenevskaya Peak (7105 meters).

The mountains of Central Asia are not just high, but also multi-tiered. Elevated foothill trails and terraces are densely dissected by ravines and form strips of mountain-desert and semi-desert bad lands - Adyrov. The lower mountain steps are the advanced ridges - counters. In the ridge zones, patches of ancient leveled surfaces survived, and in the east of the Pamirs and in the Central Tien Shan - entire plateaus. Even along pointed ridges over large areas, uniform levels with heights of about 4-6 thousand meters are visible.

Multi-storey and living nature, changing from deserts at the foothills to eternal snow and ice at the tops with zones of mountain semi-deserts and steppes, forest-steppe and meadows; there are pistachio and juniper woodlands. On rocky areas there are many thorny cushion bushes. In the wind shadow, where downward air currents move away from saturation, meadows give way to mountain steppes and even high-mountain deserts.

Although it is now customary to separate the Tien Shan and Gissaro-Alai, there is no reason to ignore many of their similarities. It is reminiscent of it, first of all, by the deep conjugations of the structures of the southeastern branches of the Urals and Inner Kazakhstan, submerged under the Aral part of the Turan Plate, with the Tien Shan and Hissar-Alai. Both mountain systems rise on the elevated flank of the Ural-Tien Shan arc; in both, young latitudinal corrugation has crushed a very ancient complex substrate into folds of large radius. The youngest alpine folds superimposed on pre-existing structures. Combined with a powerful general uplift, this created revived mountainous countries. Nowhere in our country have such ancient folded structures been subjected to such intense recent uplifts and risen so high.

Both mountainous countries are united by powerful modern glaciation and susceptibility to mudflows. The altitudinal zonation of the landscape has many common features. But the mountain-spruce forest-steppe, so characteristic of the northern slopes of the Tien Shan ranges, is replaced by juniper open forest on similar slopes of the Gissar-Alai. But in the south of both mountainous countries there are surviving tracts of lush deciduous forests.

The depths of these mountains are comparable in abundance of minerals. Their ore content is especially remarkable - the richness of ores of non-ferrous, minor and rare metals, as well as the presence of oil in the basins.

On the border of Siberia and Central Asia. To get from the mountains of Southern Siberia to the Tien Shan, you need to cross the Zaisan depression, drained by the Irtysh. It has already been said that the dam of the Bukhtarminskaya hydroelectric power station raised the level of the entire Lake Zaysan by 7 meters and forced it to flood the nearest shores. The backwater spread 100 kilometers up the Black Irtysh flowing into the lake. The depths were so insignificant that even now they rarely exceed 10 meters. The reservoir is navigable - fast "Rockets" and "Meteors", cargo tankers and barges move along it. The ice can be a meter or one and a half thick. In spring, it does not melt so much as it is consumed by the sun through evaporation. Seiners catch a lot of fish and endure real sea storms.

The expanded Zaisan has not lost its name and continues to delight the eye with its vast expanse and silky-whitish shine of the water surface. Winter in the basin is harsh in Siberian style, the semi-desert is more Central Asian, but similar flat-bottomed depressions are much more characteristic of Central Asia. The entire basin is like a bay of Central Asian landscapes.

Mountains Tarbagatai and Saur with three-kilometer heights - this is also a buffer between Southern Siberia and Central Asia. There is still taiga on the slopes, semi-desert in the foothills, but the most extensive mountain steppes are here. At the southern foot of Tarbagatai, the anciently famous Chuguchak trade route goes to Xinjiang.

Tarbagatai is separated from the northeastern facade of the Tien Shan - the Dzhungar Alatau mountains - by a flat-bottomed tectonic depression, a direct continuation of the Balkhash-Alakol strip of depressions. This is a rubble-desert corridor with eternal drafts blowing out all the fine earth, the well-known Dzhungar Gate in world history - the most convenient, barrier-free passage from the Central Asian plateaus to Kazakhstan. It served as one of the most important routes for past migrations of peoples.

Mountains of Central Asia (Tian Shan, Gissar-Alay, Pamir)

Tien Shan stretches from west to east for 2,500 kilometers, of which 1,500 are on the territory of the Soviet republics - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and the eastern thousand goes to Xinjiang. The high part of the highlands dominating the Tarim Basin was called by Chinese geographers in ancient times the Tien Shan, that is, “heavenly mountains.” Later, Russian geographers extended this name to the ridges accompanying the Central Tien Shan from the north and west. Naturally, a further division of the highlands developed - in our part there are groups of ridges called Northern, Western and Inner Tien Shan (in addition to the already mentioned Central). Sloping plains fall at the foothills—more than half of the largest oases in Central Asia owe their moisture.

Many ridges in the west and center exceed 4 kilometers and carry eternal snow and glaciers. To the southeast the heights increase. Already Terskey-Alatau reaches its peaks in 5 kilometers, and Kokshaltau reaches 6 kilometers. At the eastern junction of these ridges, the Central Tien Shan is especially grandiose.

In the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic, the Tien Shan, built by Paleozoic folds, was leveled, but in the Neogene it was subject to powerful mountain-building movements - splitting and crushing into large folds. At this time it was erected as a reborn highland. The surviving plateaus with permafrost soil at altitudes of 3-4 kilometers - syrts - are occupied by excellent meadow-steppe pastures.

Permafrost, a northern phenomenon in the sunny south, is developed in areas with little snow. The peaks, frozen to the core, never thaw. As in the subpolar tundras, soils that float and are broken into polygons, swelling mounds, subsidence above the thawing lenses of ice, and ice wedges are visible here. There is steam above the rivers in winter - water walled up by freezing ice pours into cracks and forms quite Siberian-looking ice dams.

The Tien Shan is one of the most powerful centers of modern mountain glaciation in our country. Some valley glaciers stretch for tens of kilometers. And there are also funny “flat top glaciers”, lying motionless bodies on plateaus and deprived of feeding areas. There are no slopes above them from which ice could flow and snow fall; They don’t even have drooping tongues. The annual melting does not exceed the arrival of snow due to precipitation falling on the surface of the glaciers themselves.

There are two types of evidence about the double ancient glaciation. Cloaks of moraines with boulders lining the surface of the Syrt plateaus help to conclude that the first, largest of the two glaciations was covered by extensive covers. And the jagged alpine-like peaks of the highest ridges, circus-shaped armchairs and trough-shaped valleys with more recent accumulations of moraines prove that they could only be sculpted by the last, recent glaciation, the tongues of which did not creep out onto the plateaus.

The cooling of ice ages and the glaciers themselves significantly impoverished living nature. From the broad-leaved forests that previously covered the slopes, only tracts of walnut and other “wild fruit” trees in the south of the Fergana Range and Chatkal have survived. In the north of the Tien Shan, only the hardier apple-boyarka plantations have survived from the former mixed forests. Higher up the slopes they are replaced by forests of Tien Shan spruce. This vanguard of East Asian spruce forests has taken root on shady slopes above 1200 meters; the southern slopes are conquered by mountain steppes, often with tall grasses.

Tien Shan spruce trees are so slender that they are often compared to cypress trees

Terskey-Alatau Ridge

In two places the highlands are crossed by trans-Tien Shan tracts. The Naryn highway leads from the Chu Valley along the Boam Gorge to the Issyk-Kul Basin, crosses the tip of the Terskey-Alatau ridge in a through gorge and descends through the Dolon Pass, over 3 kilometers high, into the Naryn Basin of the Inner Tien Shan. Beyond Lake Chatyrkol the tract goes to Kashgar through the Kokshaltau ridge. The Susamyr, or Great Kyrgyz, tract connects the Chu Valley with the Fergana Basin. It overcomes the Kyrgyz ridge with the help of a tunnel under the Tyuz-Ashuu pass (“camel hump”, 3586 meters), through the Susamyr syrts it reaches the valley of the Naryn breakthrough through the Fergana ridge and serves as the most important artery for communication with the cities that arose near the hydroelectric stations of the Naryn cascade - Toktogul , Kara-Kul, coal-mining Tash-Kumyr. The route leads to the Jalalabad and Osh oases of Fergana.

Dzungarian Alatau it is in vain that they call it a ridge - this is an entire mountainous country, the northeastern link of the Tien Shan. It is separated from the rest of the highlands by the flat-bottomed Ili depression, and is connected to it only by the Boro-Khoro bridge outside our country. This is like an independent Tien Shan in miniature. There are spruce forests on the northern slopes, mountain steppes on the southern slopes, desert-steppe foothills, and ridge surfaces with permafrost; there are mountain meadows and alpine highlands with glaciers and peaks above 4000 meters. There are also inland valleys with a semi-desert landscape. The subsoil contains valuable ores, for example polymetallic ores at Tekeli.

The “Dzungarian Tien Shan” has its own halo of flowering sloping plains with their unique fame. The shady slopes of the mountains and their western valleys, open to the fertile and fertile Semirechye, are especially well supplied with moisture. This name includes the entire southern slope of the Balkhash-Alakol depression, primarily Dzhetysu - “the land of seven rivers” flowing into Balkhash or drying up in dry deltas. Thus, the more western plain of the foothills of the Trans-Ili Alatau is also included in Semirechye (the city of Verny was the administrative center of the Semirechensk region). The heart of eastern Semirechye is now the regional city of Taldy-Kurgan, surrounded by parks.

Northern Tien Shan creates an outer frame for the middle parts of the highlands. The front chain of ridges here is formed by Ketmen, Zailiysky and Kyrgyz Alatau. Above Alma-Ata the frame turned out to be double - parallel to Zailiysky from the south, the Kungey-Alatau ridge, which dominates Issyk-Kul, stretches very close. In the form of an oblique northwestern spur, the backstage of the Chu-Ili Mountains extends from the tip of the Trans-Ili Alatau, the watershed significance of which is reflected in their very name.

The most popular region of the Tien Shan is the Trans-Ili Alatau. It became famous due to its proximity to Almaty and the beauty of its mountain, forest and alpine landscapes. About 900 square kilometers of them are protected in the Alma-Ata Nature Reserve, where the mountains are crowned by a magnificent five-thousander - the Talgar snow massif.

In 1963, one of the corners of these mountains became the scene of a terrible disaster. The peace and beauty of the “Alma-Ata Ritsa” - Lake Issyk (not to be confused with Issyk-Kul!), dammed 800 years ago by a landslide in a mountain valley - a blue-green eye among steep slopes covered with spruce trees, favorite place rest of Almaty residents.

On a sunny day there was thunder... out of a clear sky! A mud and stone stream burst into the lake with an artillery roar, which arose when a moraine lake broke out in the upper reaches of the Issychka River. The mudflow mass overflowed the reservoir, broke through the ancient dam, and through a gaping hole hundreds of meters deep, 5 million cubic meters of water rushed down the Issychka River. It was no longer a mud-stone, but a “water-stone” stream - it tossed and rolled stones as tall as a house, uprooted trees, demolished several streets in a foothill village and rushed into Ili, into which it flowed until its waters were withdrawn for irrigation. The “trophies” were taken along Ili even to Balkhash. Now it has been decided to revive Issyk - to return the emptied basin to its former lake beauty.

The two-stage Issyk mudflow was not the first to make us think about how to prevent such disasters; there have already been cases when cities and villages, including Alma-Ata, suffered from mudflow “invasions.” After all, the sloping plains themselves, on which cities are built, are composed of the outflows of these formidable and uncontrollable streams. This means that vulnerable objects need to be more reliably protected. Particularly dangerous mudflows hit Alma-Ata from the Malaya Almatinka valley, in which the popular Medeo stadium is located. Now his name is worthy of more than one sporting glory. In the 60s, an anti-mudflow dam almost a hundred meters high was erected here with the help of directed explosions. In 1973, it withstood the “test by combat” and stopped the first major mudflow. But the dam was at its limit. “Only mountains can resist mountains,” they said then, and they built a 50-meter dam-mountain.

Another dam was erected in the neighboring valley of the Bolshaya Almatinka River. And the Bartogay reservoir in the upper reaches of Chilik, with an area of ​​14 square kilometers and a capacity of 1/3 cubic kilometer, will supply water to the Big Almaty Canal, which has no relation to its namesake river. It is laid along the base of the Trans-Ili Alatau for more than 100 kilometers. Dozens of siphons (underground water conduits) will allow him to cross the lower reaches of many rivers flowing from the ridge. The water will come to the fields at the foothills, and even Alma-Ata will seem to be on a full-flowing river!

Of course, the proximity of the mountains brings more than just mudflow worries to the townspeople of the oases: it also pleases them with the splendor of the landscapes - forest and alpine, and at the same time, in the full sense of the word, suburban. Within easy reach near Alma-Ata, or rather, above it, as well as above Frunze and Tashkent, there are strings of tourist centers, ski resorts and health resorts - climatic, kumiss, balneological.

It is interesting to compare the appearance of the two sloping plains on which Alma-Ata and Frunze grew - capitals, buried in the shady greenery of alleys and parks. Along the foothills of the mountains the Ili and Chu flow in the middle sections of their currents. But Ili, 50-70 kilometers away from the base, does not participate in the irrigation of foothill oases - all of them depend only on the rivers flowing directly from the Trans-Ili Alatau. The picture is different in Kyrgyzstan. The Chu, reaching the bottom of the inclined plain, turned to the west and became the main source of irrigation here, feeding the Bolshoi Chuisky (BChK), Atbashinsky and other canals; the entire valley between the Chu-Ili mountains and the Kyrgyz ridge is called Chui. In both stripes, agriculture is carried out in the Central Asian way - irrigated, but among the southern crops at these altitudes (700-900 meters) only rice and grapes coexist. The predominant areas are fields of wheat and yellow tobacco, melon fields, and vegetable gardens. The outskirts of Almaty are famous for their apple orchards, where amazingly sized aport apples ripen. The Chumysh hydroelectric complex commands the irrigation of the entire valley.

The Northern Tien Shan is separated from the Inner Tien Shan by the vast Issyk-Kul tectonic and still seismic basin, in which lies an amazing creation of nature - Issyk-Kul, a “warm”, that is, non-freezing, lake-sea, the surface of which is elevated more than 1600 meters above ocean level. The reservoir is huge: along its length for 178 kilometers the horizon is not visible, the impression is as if you are seeing a large bay open sea. Across the lake, 60 kilometers away, the shores would also be almost invisible, but above them rise the Kungey- and Terskey-Alatau mountain ranges, 4-5 kilometers high. The picture is especially impressive when their snowy ridges are doubled by reflections in the lake. And the depths here are completely marine - a little less than 700 meters.

Very close to the lake, almost touching its western corner, flows the Chu, which has just left the Orto-Tokoy reservoir. Its connection with the lake was renewed more than once through a temporary watercourse, but now the flow through the Boam Gorge has carried the entire river with it.

The area at the western tip of Issyk-Kul is unattractive; the port of Rybachye has only recently been decorated with greenery. To the east, the nature of the coasts becomes richer - a direct response to increased moisture: at the opposite end of the lake, rain falls 5-6 times more than in the west. The wet winds from the reservoir here truly breathed life into the landscape: the wheat fields sway, the melon fields and vegetable gardens turn green; Alleys of poplars and flowering gardens are reminiscent of the landscapes of Ukraine and Kuban. Not far from Przhevalsk bathing in the gardens, on the shore of one of the bays, there is an obelisk with an image of an eagle and a bas-relief - this is a monument to the grave of the traveler Przhevalsky who died here.

Wonderful bathing, all the delights of the sea south, but without the heat even at the height of summer (the altitude affects it!), healing springs and the grandeur of the mountain-lake landscape - all this has earned Issyk-Kul the rank of a health resort of all-Union significance. The resort on radon springs in the valley of the “seven bulls” - Jety-Oguz - is especially life-giving; This is the Kyrgyz name for the ornate cliffs of brick-red sandstone at the foot of Terskey.

Part of the bottom of the basin and adjacent mountain slopes protected in nine separate areas of the Issyk-Kul Nature Reserve.

Together with the Caspian, Aral and Balkhash, Issyk-Kul shares the fate of drainless lakes, the life of which depends on the influx of river waters. They spent it on irrigation, the flow decreased due to forest cuttings - the lake in response lowered the level by 3 meters.

Chingiz Aitmatov compared his mirror to the inevitably shrinking shagreen skin and inspiredly called for saving the “fragile pearls of Issyk-Kul.” After all, both the reservoir itself and the surrounding landscape suffer.

Perhaps some archaeologists rejoiced at the water leaving the shores. Once upon a time, the lake rose and flooded the coastal structures - divers were equipped to study them. Now underwater secrets have become available for land excavations. Medieval bricks and pottery shards have already been found in ancient muds, and stone tools even turned out to be Neanderthal.

To maintain the beauty and glory of Issyk-Kul, it is necessary to more decisively protect the lake from pollution; sharply reduce logging; at least partially reorient irrigated grain and fodder farming to less water-intensive gardening... But increasingly there are calls to fill the rivers that feed the lake with water from neighboring basins. The easiest way is to return the Chu River here. But its water is needed by the fields of the Chui Valley. Take it away from the tributaries of the middle reaches Or? But this will create another item of damage to the water balance of Balkhash.

Maintaining the advantages of Issyk-Kul is one of the incompletely resolved problems of environmental management in Central Asia.

To the south of Terskey lies the most heavenly part of the highlands - the high-mountain desert Central Tien Shan. In the east, on the border with China, the gigantic Mustag node (ice mountains) rose with heights of 6-7 kilometers. Among the tree-like glaciers is Inylchek, the second longest in the country (59 kilometers).

Northern Inylchek Glacier

At the confluence of its two branches, an incredible lake turns violently blue on its icy shores, which is called humming and even speaking for the hum that periodically arises in it. Water periodically leaves through voids in the ice, lowering the level by tens of meters or even completely emptying the wild ice bath with stranded “white marble” icebergs. Then the multi-kilometer drainage tunnel is clogged, and the reservoir is filled again. The lake bears the name of the geographer and mountaineer Merzbacher who discovered it.

The southern facade of the mountains is formed by the eastern links of the border chain - the Kokshaltau ridge, crowned by the second highest peak in the country - Pobeda Peak. And on the middle spur of the Meridian Ridge rises the legendary Khan Tengri - “lord of the heavenly powers”. Its popularity was especially promoted by the chiseled regularity of the pyramidal peak and the fact that it culminates above the neighboring peaks more noticeably than the more vague Victory Peak.

To the west lies the Inner Tien Shan, which is also called the syrtov, or the edge of the jailoo - summer pastures. The calm, albeit fast flow of rivers on the reaches of longitudinal valleys gives way to bubbling rapids in through transverse gorges. On the syrts above 3 kilometers there are two vast lakes - the fresh flowing Sonkel and the flowless, bitter-salty Chatyrkol. Until recently, the icy waters of Sonkel were considered dead, but now Siberian peled and broad whitefish have been bred in it.

The core river here is Naryn, an energy hero. About 6 million kilowatts at more than 20 hydroelectric power stations will make it possible to obtain differences in its bed in through valleys. A total of six cascades will be created. The mighty Lower Naryn cascade consisting of the Toktogul, Kurpsai, Tashkumyr and two Uchkurgan hydroelectric stations is the first to be completed. Here, the Toktogul hydroelectric power station operates at full capacity—almost a million and a quarter kilowatts. Its reservoir held over 19 cubic kilometers of water, and the dam that dammed it near the young city of Kara-Kul rose more than 200 meters. Below, the path to the green-turquoise waters of Naryn is already blocked by the Kurpsai hydroelectric power station dam.

From the southwest, the Inner Tien Shan is fenced by the Fergana Range, drawn obliquely on the map, which modern times was raised along an ancient deep fault. Its foothills are coal-bearing and oil-bearing, and the resort city of Jalal-Abad grew on the hot waters.

On the lower slopes of the ridge there are good relict walnut forests inherited from pre-Quaternary times. They continue further west, along southern slopes Ugam ridge and Chatkal.

The extreme western protrusion of the Tien Shan is called the Western Tien Shan. The mountain node of the Talas Alatau, crowned by the 4.5-kilometer-high Manas peak, is adjacent to a lattice of ridges, elongated in five parallel rows and separated by large longitudinal valleys.

In the south, the coal-bearing valley of Akhangaran (Angren) is especially famous. One of the more northern valleys became famous for its cascade of 18 hydroelectric stations, Chirchik, and large valleys of its tributaries open to it - Chatkal, Pskem and Ugama, after which the adjacent ridges are named.

The combined delta of Chirchik and Akhangaran at the western end of this “pack” of ridges forms one of the richest oases in Central Asia - Tashkent. Numerous traces of 2000 years of history are intricately intertwined in its space. Today it is occupied by a huge city with a whole swarm of satellite cities. Tashkent, restored and transformed after the catastrophic earthquake of 1966, is lavishly decorated with greenery of parks and alleys, mirrors of reservoirs.

In the north, the depression between the Kyrgyz and Talas Alatau ridges is occupied by the flowering Talas Valley, at the exit from which the rich Dzhambul oasis is located near the mountains. To the west of the Tien Shan, a sword raised as if with a backhand goes away - the Karatau ridge - “black mountains”. The corner between it and other ridges of the Western Tien Shan is filled with the merged deltas of the Arys and its tributaries - this is another blooming oasis - Chimkent.

No part of the Tien Shan is so generously endowed with mineral wealth as the western one. Against the backdrop of the black-gray slopes of Karatau, the quarters of Kentau and Achisaya, where polymetallic ores are mined, and the cities of Zhanatas and Karatau are white - here is one of the world's largest phosphorite basins. It stretches along the mountains for 125 kilometers and contains more than one and a half billion tons of phosphorites.

The Kuraminsky ridge with the Karamazor slope is especially ore-bearing. Based on the spectrum of minerals concentrated here, it is compared, albeit not without exaggeration, with some of the Urals and others with the Kola Peninsula. We will list only ores - iron and copper, polymetals, tungsten, molybdenum, bismuth, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, a number of rare metals; there is also gold.

The Kurama subsoil has been known since ancient times. The adits and other workings of silver and copper ores that are still visible today are monuments to the work of ancient miners - the medieval mines of Kani-Mansur near Adrasman, famous today for its bismuth, or Kansai for its mercury. Polymetals and copper accompany each other in the particularly rich ore region of Almalyk, Altyntopkan and Kuruksay.

Angren is a stoker containing about a quarter of the coal reserves of Central Asia. Mining here takes place both in the mine and from the surface. On the basis of the Akhangaran “Valley of Treasures” and the nearby mountains, the Chatkal-Kuraminsky territorial-production complex is being formed with favorable mutual placement and interaction of mining and processing enterprises.

For residents of Tashkent, the Western Tien Shan is a cool and green suburban area, a favorite vacation spot. The trip to Charvak and Chimgan is especially good. Above the mouth of the Ugam River, Chirchik is dammed by the largest dam in the entire cascade (one and a half hundred meters high) Charvak hydroelectric power station. Its power is 600 thousand kilowatts. Two cubic kilometers of water entered the mouth sections of the Chatkal and Pskem valleys, forming Chirchik, creating a water area of ​​about 40 square kilometers. A trip around the reservoir and panoramic views from the panoramic platform above the dam leaves wonderful memories.

Around the reservoir stretches the blessed corner of Western Chatkal - the Bostandyk area and the Chimgan valley, inviting skiers. The three-kilometer-high mountain barrier of the same name intercepts the lost moisture from the winds that cross the desert, and Bostandyk receives up to 1,000 millimeters of precipitation per year - three times more than in Tashkent. Here, as in the south of the Chatkal ridge, thickets of wild apple trees are rampant, and walnut groves, the northernmost in Central Asia, are adorned.

Resorts arose at the southern base of Chatkal. The most famous of them, the thermal hydrogen sulfide-radon Chartak, became an all-Union health resort.

Four large areas of nature in the Western Tien Shan are protected. More than 350 square kilometers are occupied by the Chatkal reserve, closest to Tashkent, over 180 - Besh-Aralsky in the Chatkal valley, about 240 - Sary-Chelek, near the junction of the Chatkal ridge with the Talas, and 730 square kilometers - Aksu-Dzhabaglinsky on the Ugam ridge and the tip of the Talas Alatau. All these are majestic mountainous territories with heights of up to 3-4 kilometers, in Aksu-Dzhabagly - with dozens of glaciers. The name of the Sary-Chelek Nature Reserve was given by one of the best decorations of Central Asian nature - Lake Sary-Chelek, located at a two-kilometer altitude.

Fergana Basin. The Tien Shan and Gissar-Alai mountains, firmly connected in the east by the Fergana ridge, and in the west closely adjacent to the neck of the Farhad Gate of the Syr Darya, widely part between these nodes, embracing a giant basin, to which for some reason the name “Fergana Valley” is attached, although there is nothing like a valley here. This tectonic oval of subsidence, amazing in size and regularity of outline, with a diameter of 325 kilometers along the parallel and up to 90 kilometers along the meridian, occupies an area of ​​more than 22 thousand square kilometers. For its riches, Fergana was considered the pearl of the Russian Empire in the past.

The fact that in ancient times the basin was the center of various civilizations is reminiscent of traces of ancient settlements and medieval monuments. Today it is one of the most prosperous territories of Central Asia, divided between three union republics - Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It provides the country with about a quarter of all cotton harvests and a third of silkworm cocoons.

This basin is a seismic trough inherited from ancient times and to this day, the folded foundation of which is buried for kilometers. Its bottom would have long ago been below ocean level (as it was when the gulf of the pre-Quaternary Sarmatian Sea penetrated here), if this subsidence had not been compensated for by the intensive supply of rubble and pebbles from the surrounding mountains. The modern bottom of the basin lies at altitudes of up to 1000 meters in the east and 300 in the west.

The ridges isolate the basin from wet winds. Its bottom receives only a meager desert dose of rain per year - 100-150 millimeters, and only the foothills receive a little more (up to 300). Therefore, the desert dominates on the flat bottom, and on the periphery there are mountain deserts of the foothills, which above turn into mountain semi-deserts. Mountains protect the depression from cold winds ( average temperature January does not go below minus 3°) and share with it the moisture flowing down the slopes.

A ring of rich oases embraced Fergana. They are fed by both surface watercourses and a powerful plume of underground runoff under foothill sediments. The transit Syr Darya flows along the northern border of the Fergana ellipse, formed by the confluence of the Kara Darya and Naryn. Their waters feed large main canals - the Bolshoi, Northern and Southern Fergana - the first-born of nationwide construction projects during the pre-war five-year plans and many of the newest canals. The waterless planes are decorated with the Uchkurgan, Kairakkum, and Farkhad reservoirs, but the latter has become heavily silted.

In addition to the round dance of cities and roads connecting this ring of oases, Fergana is also ringed by a network of gas pipelines and a unified control system for all the canals feeding it. Transverse rivers also participate in irrigation, and therefore even dry up in dry deltas. They, too, seem to have joined hands in a round dance - their lower reaches are connected by canals that make it possible to regulate water supply and transfer water to neighbors who need it.

Some of the pebble-crushed stone outfalls were involved in the arched uplifts of neighboring ridges. This is how whimsically cut ravines arose ( saiami) bad lands: conglomerate and loess adyrs, embracing almost the entire Fergana. In places and even in the axial part of the depression, these young sediments have experienced recent collapse and rise in amazing youth-folded ridges of impressive size. Some of them have domes made of rock salt pressed upward.

Dominates cultural landscape- endless fields of cotton, cut through by fans of irrigation ditches, green areas of gardens, melons and vineyards, alleys of poplars and mulberries, white acacia, plane trees and elms. Large cities grew in the oases: Leninabad, Andijan, Fergana, Kokand, Osh, Namangan, Margilan. Resorts are becoming increasingly famous; the most promising of them is the hydrogen sulfide Chimion, “Fergana Matsesta”.

Hissar-Alay. In the accumulation of the highest ridges between the Tien Shan and the Pamirs, a kind of buffer zone stands out with the Alai Range in the east and the fan of Gissar ranges in the west. For a long time there was no consensus as to what this strip of mountains should be classified as: some considered it to be part of the Pamirs and spoke of it as something single, the Pamir-Alai; others believed that the extreme southwestern protrusion of the Tien Shan adjoins here, close to the Pamirs. But this strip of mountains is separated from the Tien Shan by the huge Fergana Basin, and from the Pamirs by the deep trench of the Alai Valley. And the structure of the subsoil is different from that inherent in both neighboring highlands. That is why it has become generally accepted to distinguish an independent mountain system under the name Gissaro-Alai, contrasted with both the Tien Shan and the Pamirs.

The close proximity of the icy heights of the northern and dry subtropics of southern Tajikistan... The brightest colors of rivers and lakes, flowering gardens and meadows, even the rocks themselves, shimmering with all the colors of the stone rainbow - the rocks composing them are so colorful... Giant dams and reservoirs... All this is the Gissaro-Alay, an asymmetrical ridge with a drier and gentler northern slope and a more moist steep southern slope (the north receives up to 450, the south - 600-1200 millimeters of precipitation per year). On the inner slopes of the mountains and in the valleys, dryness, rockiness, and an abundance of almost bare rocks sharply increase - here only 150 millimeters of precipitation falls per year.

The length of the shaft is about 750 kilometers, and the width varies in different sections. In the east there is one Alai ridge, only 70-90 kilometers across. In the middle part, Kuhistan - the “country of mountains” - expands more than twice, but is divided into three parallel ridges: Turkestan, Zeravshan and Gissar. The western branches of Hissar fan out over 350 kilometers. The inconspicuous Malguzar-Nuratau chain extends to the northwest, obliquely in relation to the latitudinal ridges. From the south, Gissar is adjacent to a grid of ridges of Southern Tajikistan with densely populated valleys.

The largest ridges have a high-alpine appearance and powerful glaciers. In the Matcha node, up to 5621 meters high, where Alai bifurcates into the Turkestan and Zeravshan ridges, the tree-like Zeravshan glacier is almost 25 kilometers long.

The northern slope of the Gissar-Alai faces the Fergana Basin. South of the city Fergana, the popular mountain climatic resort of Hamzaabad in the Shakhimardan valley, beautiful lakes. The most inhabited part inside Gissaro-Alai is the Zeravshan valley, heavily terraced, as if lined into five tiers of platforms and edges. Its extensions form the Penjikent basin, and in the lower reaches the Samarkand oasis. The tugai of the Zeravshan floodplain and its dry delta are protected in the Zeravshan and Karakul reserves. Archaeologists have excavated the ancient settlement of Penjikent from the times of ancient Sogdiana. The monuments of the Middle Ages are also interesting.

In 1964, this valley was not spared by a catastrophic landslide that dammed the river near the village of Aini. The dam's breakthrough threatened disaster for the entire underlying valley. The explosion cut a route for water drainage - it was drained by a 60-meter waterfall.

The Zeravshan ridge with heights of up to 5489 meters (Mount Chimtarga) would be more accurately called a chain - it is completely cut through by the gorges of the left tributaries of the Zeravshan, the longitudinal upper reaches of which and the Kashkadarya going to the west separate it from the more southern Gissar. There are many first-class natural phenomena here: a chain of magnificent Marguzor lakes, strung like beads on a thread of the Shing River, the bubbling rapids of Yagnob, breaking through cyclopean stone rubble; Iskander Darya, flowing with a 30-meter waterfall from the landslide-dammed Lake Iskanderkul, also one of the most beautiful in Central Asia.

The subsoil is ore-bearing here too. A belt of antimony-mercury deposits stretches along the northern slope. There are tungsten ores and fluorite reserves.

In the coking coals near Yagnob, an underground fire that arose as a result of spontaneous combustion lasts for centuries - it was known about already in the 10th century. Along the Fergana foothills there are two garlands of deposits - coal and oil.

Nature is protected in five reserves: mountain-juniper Kyzylsu, Mirakin, Ramit, Zaamin and mountain-nut Nurata. The first two are located in the Kashkadarya River basin, the third - in the upper reaches of Kafirnigan, the fourth - in the area where the Malguzar ridge adjoins the Turkestan, and the fifth - on the slopes of the extreme northwestern branch of the Gissar-Alai - the Nuratau ridge. The horned goat, listed in the Red Book, is protected in the Kugitangtau mountains and Southern Tajikistan. A natural national park has been organized on the northern slope of the Turkestan ridge.

The Trans-Gissar highway Leninabad - Dushanbe crosses all three ridges (two through passes, Zeravshansky - along the through Fandarya gorge) and allows you to get acquainted with Gissar-Alay as if in cross-section. In addition to the “usual” beauty of the alpine heights, the route captivates with the variegated colors of the rocks - intensely red, pink, lilac, green, yellow. Here, as on the poster, you can see the differences between the altitude zones and the contrasts of opposite slopes. A 5-kilometer tunnel is being built to bypass the Anzob Pass.

When descending from Gissar to the south, we find ourselves from a world of bare stones under a green tree canopy. The place of northern juniper woodlands was taken by lush broad-leaved copses of maple, plane tree, walnut and many wild fruit trees in mountain forest gardens. In the belt of maximum precipitation (900-1200 millimeters per year), non-irrigated farming is possible; this is a “zone of secured rainfed" Work on terraced forest plantations began on tens of thousands of hectares.

The Varzob flowing through Dushanbe (below it is called Dushanbinka) feeds both the city water pipes and the Great Gissar Canal, laid to the west along the foothills of the mountains all the way to the Surkhandarya basin. Along the eastern foothills of Gissar lies the valley of the right source of the Vakhsh, the Surkhob River, along a tectonic seam. Along the northwestern Pamir tract (not to be confused with the main Trans-Pamir!) it is easiest to get to the highest Alai ridges, the Alai Valley and the seven-thousanders of the Pamirs. In the lake-like extensions of the Surkhoba valley, the villages of Garm, Novabad and Khait, which have repeatedly suffered from devastating earthquakes, are surrounded by gardens.

The chain of the Malguzar-Nuratau ridges is dissected by the gorge of the Sanzar River, the narrow part of which is called the Tamerlane or Iron Gates - in the past, the approaches to Timur’s capital Samarkand were blocked in this defile by gates with an iron chain. Now there are highways and Railway from Tashkent to Samarkand. Sanzar would have dried up if back in the last century it had not been watered by a canal diverted from Zeravshan through the tip of the Turkestan ridge. Sanzar has muddy water even in autumn - after all, it is Zeravshan water, fed by glaciers.

The southwestern branch of Gissar - the Baysuntau - Kugitangtau chain ends at Turkmenistan and approaches the Amu Darya. The famous mountain pass Iron Gates (another one!), this time customs, opens the way from Karshi and Samarkand to Termez, it is called the Great Uzbek Highway. Baysuntau and its spurs also amaze with the fantastic colors of the rocks. The Gaurdag sulfur deposits are important in the Kugitang Mountains. Enchanting caves with deposits of marble-like onyx of rare transparency are known. The reserves of the Karlyuk and Karabil deposits of potassium salts amount to billions of tons.

To the east are piled up deeply indented gorges South Tajik mountains, composed, like part of Gissar, by Meso-Cenozoic variegated strata. The eastern ridges of the middle mountains rise in the form of steps leading to the Pamirs, already clearly higher than the “average” ones (up to 3-4 kilometers). The western ones rarely exceed 2 kilometers, but they look like low mountains, because the basins separating them themselves lie at levels of about a thousand meters. Among the mountains there are massifs made of pure rock salt, such as the snow-white, although snowless, Mount Khoja-Mumin.

The pride of Tajikistan is the gigantic Nurek hydroelectric power station, the “eighth wonder of the world,” with a capacity of 2.7 million kilowatts, which has harnessed the wild Vakhsh. Following it, on the same Vakhsh, there is an even more powerful Rogun hydroelectric power station, the most powerful in Central Asia. And in total, in the Vakhsh cascade, counting the three previously created stations in the lower reaches, nine hydroelectric power stations with a total capacity of up to 10 million kilowatts will operate.

Nurek owes its name to the Tajik word “norak” - light, light, ray. In the Pulisangin Gorge, a dam has been erected that has risen to 300 meters - this is the height of the Eiffel Tower! In conditions of the greatest seismic activity, this is a miracle of hydraulic engineering. In response to the shaking, the dam should only compact, promising to withstand the pressure of 10.5 cubic kilometers of water held by it. The reservoir, which flooded the Vakhsh valley for 70 kilometers, rivals the Sarez Lake of the Pamirs in its blueness, outline and size. Navigation to the site of the Rogun hydroelectric power station arose here. An almost 14-kilometer tunnel transmits its water to the neighboring Dangara Valley. And below Nurekskaya, Vakhsh is blocked by another - the Baipazinskaya dam. It raised the river level by 50 meters; From here, water was sent through a seven-kilometer tunnel through the ridge into the Yavan and Obikiik valleys, which until recently were waterless. It is in these three valleys that the fine-fibered Egyptian cotton ripens.

The Vakhsh Valley, oddly enough, is not a synonym for the entire Vakhsh Valley above and below Nurek, but an independent proper name, applied only to the lower reaches of the river. It was this that made it famous when this area was the first object of irrigation in the dry subtropics of Tajikistan. Here, long before Nurek, a cascade of three waterworks was created. The head dam, 40 meters high, allowed to accumulate 10 cubic kilometers of water and flood the valley for 15 kilometers.

Unfortunately, even the most useful landscape transformations have downsides. The silt that previously enriched the fields and filled the cracks in the bottom of the irrigation ditches settles in the reservoirs. Clarified water is depleted of nutrients - they can be replaced by fertilizers, although they are not cheap. But who will hold back increased filtration with losses from a quarter to half of the water volume? And here we need considerable funds to cover thousands of linear kilometers of irrigation and drainage networks.

Much has changed in the Tigrovaya Balka Nature Reserve. In the 1930s, more than 400 square kilometers of tugai thickets in the lowlands at the confluence of the Vakhsh and Pyanj were taken under protection. The nature here amazed with the virgin density of thickets of poplar-turanga and jida, thickets of tamarisk and wild sugar cane. Tigers were found in the reed jungles until 1959. The glory of the “balka” was the tugai Bukhara deer hangul - the “royal flower” of the Persian poets. There were wolves, jackals, hyenas, jungle cats - Hausas. The world of birds was rich: slow swans, Indian mynah starlings, pheasants, considered the most beautiful in the world. There are also huge monitor lizards and a lot of snakes. The reserve was literally teeming with life.

The huge withdrawal of Vakhsh waters for irrigation changed the entire regime of the reserved land and water: the channels began to become shallow and dry up, the reeds died, the animals began to scatter... Well, should we close the reserve and drain its lands in order to use them for cotton growing? No, it was considered useful to extend the protected status of this “laboratory in nature”, but not as an example of a pristine landscape, but as an object for studying the processes that arose as a result of its forced transformation.

The richest of the southern Tajik valleys is Gissar. It stretched out in a wide strip for more than a hundred kilometers. It is wetter here than in the lower foothill valleys (over 500 millimeters of rain per year), and there are also excessively heavy rainfalls, leading to mudslides and floods. The conditions of the dry subtropics are at their limit - at a kilometer altitude it can be cold. Nevertheless, flourishing oases arose in the valleys of Kafirnigan and Varzob - Ordzhonikidzeabad and Dushanbe, in which the young capital of Tajikistan, Dushanbe, grew up.

The Trans-Pamir Highway begins from the city of Osh, which lies at the eastern head of the Fergana Basin. It rises to the Alai ridge to the Taldyk pass with a height of 3650 meters, from where a very short descent leads to the Alai Valley, the bottom of which itself is raised above 3 kilometers. This trench is a seismic trough, but it did not descend: it rose along with its sides, only lagging behind them during the rise. This is how the valley arose, stretching for 190 kilometers with a width of 25-40.

The erosion of the red sandstones of the Trans-Alai Range gave a red color to even the water main river down. In Turkic-speaking Kyrgyzstan, the upper course of the river is called Kyzylsu, and below its confluence with Muksu, in Farso-speaking Tajikistan, it receives the name Surkhob; both names mean "red water".

The Alai Valley is often considered the threshold of the Pamirs - it already has many typical Pamir features in the landscape, average annual temperatures are close to tundra (+10°), there are almost no days without frost, and the western half is dominated by sparse mountain semi-deserts. But unlike the Pamirs, in the eastern part of the valley there are concentrated luxurious mountain-steppe and even meadow pastures with highly nutritious grass stands - large flocks of sheep and schools of horses feed here; even cattle are brought here from Fergana - in the summer over a million heads accumulate! On the more rocky foothills and on the ancient moraine hills at the Trans-Alai foothills you can see herds of yaks - a distinctly Pamir feature.

Like two snow-white ridges of clouds, stripes of supra-worldly peaks and ridges hover above the bottom and sides of the valley. On the Trans-Alai Range, many of them exceed 6 kilometers, and Lenin Peak even reaches 7134 meters - this is the third highest peak in our country. A picture of rare greatness, but with such absolute marks one could expect more. This is roughly what the lower alpine ridges of the Caucasus look like when you look at them from the plains of Ciscaucasia. After all, here the base is raised up to 3 kilometers, so the excess of the ridges above the bottom of the valley turns out to be relatively moderate.

In Persian “pa-mi-ihr” means “foot of the Sun god” - isn’t this where the name Pamir came from? And with it another elevating definition has grown together - “the roof of the world.” Truly a roof raised above the world to levels from 4 to 7 kilometers. The inhabitants of the Pamirs joke that they are 4 kilometers closer to the sky than the rest of the inhabitants of the Earth. Only people living in the high parts of the Tibetan and Bolivian plateaus can argue with them.

The Pamirs are crowned by the highest peak of the country - Communism Peak (7495 meters, since 1998 renamed Ismail Somoni Peak. - Note edit.). And how many more unique and greatest things are there! The deepest gorges and the longest glaciers. The proximity of huge accumulations of ice and mountain-desert waterlessness. An incredible area of ​​permafrost at such low latitudes (37-39°). Here, as nowhere else, the scale of geological disasters occurring before human eyes is colossal, but here, higher than anywhere else in our country, populated areas penetrate and high-mountain agriculture finds its upper limit...

What are the boundaries of the Pamirs? In the broadest sense of the word, this highland extends beyond the borders of our country. In the west, the mountains of Badakhshan continue on the left bank of the Pyanj. In the south, the Eastern Hindu Kush can also easily be considered another latitudinal ridge of the Pamirs. To the east of our border, the relief and landscape of the Pamir type are characteristic of the Kashgar Mountains, that is, the tip of Kunlun. The highest peaks of the “Kashgar Pamir”, and therefore the entire highland, are the foreign giants Kongur (7719 meters) and Mustagata (7546 meters). But let us agree to apply the concept of Pamir only to Soviet territory.

The structure of the subsoil here is complex and mosaic, like few places in our mountains. Treasures of enormous thickness, measured in tens of kilometers, have been crushed and crushed. Folds and faults of Alpine age captured both Cenozoic and Mesozoic sedimentary formations, and more ancient and rigid structures were crushed and tilted. The highlands warped and crumpled even in the process of the latest arch uplift, which was of colossal scope here. The strata that were deposited at the foothills geologically recently, in the Paleogene, are now located at altitudes of up to 5 kilometers in the Trans-Alai and Peter the Great ridges.

There are ridges-monuments to previously existing mountains. The cliffs of Darvaz seem to be stuffed with stones. These are fragments of the mountains that arose here in the early stages of the rise of the Pamirs, but were destroyed. Crushed stone and pebbles, cemented into conglomerates, reminiscent of this, are raised upward; they are called Darvaz. Geologists appreciate their gold content, and tourists admire the diversity of the cliffs - both the pebbles and the cement that holds them together are colorful.

The introduction of granite magma and the eruptions of ancient volcanoes contributed to a variety of mineralization - there are ores of molybdenum and tungsten, many rare metals, deposits of rock crystal, mica, and gems.

On the border of the Eastern and Western Pamirs, the highest rise of the entire highland rises - the almost meridional ridge of the Academy of Sciences. It is focused on such peaks as Communism Peak and the fourth highest seven-thousander in the country - Evgenia Korzhenevskaya Peak (7105 meters). The longest (77 kilometers) glacier, named Fedchenko, also lies along this ridge. It is tree-like and receives more than 30 tributary glaciers. The ice in this numb river still flows, moving an average of 250 meters per year.

The Pamirs are a majestic center of modern glaciation. Over a thousand glaciers occupy an area of ​​8 thousand square kilometers. In the recent past, although the snow limit decreased by only 400 - 700 meters, the area of ​​glaciers was many times greater. The length of some of them exceeded 200 kilometers, and Scandinavian-type ice caps appeared in the east.

The glaciers of the Pamirs have to be studied closely. This has been done for many years, in particular, by the world’s highest hydrometeorological observatory above the Fedchenko glacier, located at an altitude of 4169 meters.

We are accustomed to thinking that glaciers flow slowly. Pamir forced me to change this opinion. Some of them, as if pulsating, accumulate such excess matter and force that they periodically push their ice like a piston down the valley at a speed of tens and even hundreds of meters per day.

With a roar, the ice ram advances, bombarding the slopes with “suitcases” of ice blocks falling from its edges, and with its forward facade cutting off moraine hills, bushes, and buildings like a bulldozer knife. This is exactly how the enraged “ice bear” - the Medvezhiy glacier - behaved in the spring of 1963. His advance cut off the path to crystal development and left people homeless. An uncontrollable ice flow blocked the path to one of the sources of Vanch. If the ice dam had been broken by 14 million cubic meters of water, a terrible surge from the drained lake would have swept down the entire Vanch, bringing untold devastation. At the cost of intense efforts, the water was released and drained. The glacier “went crazy” and calmed down. But a pulse is a pulse, it has its own rhythm, and after 10 years the “bear” gained strength again, as glaciologists predicted. Much happened again; 16 million cubic meters of water had already accumulated in the lake. Only after new progress in 1978 was the lake finally drained.

The border between the Eastern and Western Pamirs is considered to be the “break of the valleys” line, to which the deep incision of the thalwegs managed to spread to the east. To the west of this winding line, the valleys sharply narrow, turn into gorges, and their gentle beds become steep - this is the Western Pamir. On its ridges, only in some places undestroyed sections of plateaus with landscapes of the Eastern Pamir type have survived; but the upper reaches of individual western gorges made their way through deep incisions far to the east.

The Eastern Pamirs are a world of extremes, more reminiscent of the high deserts of Central Asia. Desert moraine and gravel plains at altitudes of 4-5 kilometers; ridges with 6-kilometer peak marks, but in appearance they are only medium-altitude and even low-altitude - they rise only a kilometer and a half above the soles. Some plateaus are so vast that the mountains from them are visible only in a bluish haze on the horizon. “The Pamirs are the flat palm of the earth on which the sky lies,” Yuri Sbitnev managed to generalize!

A lot of things helped here to preserve the ancient leveled surfaces: widely spaced arches of folds; distance from cutting gorges; the softening role of ancient glaciers - they slid from the ridges to the foothills and merged into single piedmont masses, as is now the case in Alaska. The valleys are filled with moraine rubble, sometimes as if compactly rolled, and are depressing with the barren crusts of salt marshes and takyrs.

The air is thin, the pressure is sharply reduced, the snow line runs at altitudes of 4.5-5.5 kilometers. Frosts down to minus 50°, despite the brightness of the high southern sun. On the saline soils there is a permafrost microrelief: typical tundra stone polygons, and on these stones there is a completely southern desert tan - after all, here we have the highest rates of solar radiation.

Wet winds penetrate here through the ridges only in a downward flow and produce almost no precipitation - only 75 - 100 millimeters fall per year.

Among the deserts there are blue lakes: drainless - Shorkul, Karakul and flowing - Rangkul. The most notable of them is Karakul - “ black lake", stretching out in a tectonic depression at an altitude of more than 3900 meters - 100 meters above the famous Titicaca in the Andes, with a mirror 20-30 kilometers across. Its bitter-salty water freezes for more than six months. The depths reach almost a quarter of a kilometer, and the ancient glacier also participated in the final appearance of the depression, covering it with a continuous massif. Thick layers of unmelting ice are visible at the underwater foot of the coastal cliffs.

Konstantin Simonov saw Karakul not black, but deep blue and white - these were the colors of water and ice: “And around the blue-white lake there are camel-colored red mountains with prickly peaks cut into the light blue sky. This landscape is reminiscent of Roerich’s paintings, as, indeed, very much in the Pamirs in general resembles them.”

In calm weather, this is a reservoir with azure-clear water. But more often, dashing dusty winds blow here. During a stormy north, the lake turns gray and even black from boiling ripples and swells. Is this where his “black” name comes from?

To the north of the lake, the snowy and icy Trans-Alai Range stretches for 290 kilometers, crowned by Lenin Peak and crossed by the Trans-Pamir Highway (it is simply called the Pamir Highway). It took a lot of effort to build the tract. They are also needed for everyday operation of the track in conditions of harsh climate and oxygen starvation - both people and engines feel it. Avalanches are terrible in winter. This year-round motorway is called a “difficulty route.” The length of the tract is 700 kilometers; it crosses the Pamir square not diagonally, but runs along the peripheral legs of its outskirts.

In the northern part, the road leads through two famous passes: Kyzylart (red pass) - through the Trans-Alai ridge at an altitude of 4280 meters and the ever-snowy Akbaital (white stallion) south of Karakul - 4641 meters. In the vicinity of Murghab, the desert is dotted with only rare, inconspicuous bushes of teresken, the only fuel in these places; it also serves as food for the yaks. Life processes are so slow that even tiny specimens of teresken can be several hundred years old. On rare patches of pastures, only nomadic cattle breeding is possible: feed is so scarce that not a single pasture, except for yak tereskens, will feed livestock throughout the entire season. And yet, tens of thousands of sheep and many thousands of meat-haired yaks graze here, which also provide excellent milk. Yaks are unpretentious, “frost-resistant”, and spend the whole year under open air and do not complain about low blood pressure or poor oxygen regimen.

Near Murghab, at the Chichekty experimental station, biologists and agronomists are developing early-ripening varieties of barley, rye, and vegetables. The Nayzatash pass, 4137 meters high, leads the route to the Alichur valley. Along the way, you can't stop admiring the intricate weathering patterns of creamy conglomerates and brick-red sandstones. This is one of the most beautiful sections of the route. Bristly and ridged ridges, domes, pyramids, a variegation of yellow, brown and purple colors combined with the whiteness of the snow...

If you leave the tract and turn along the path into the lower section of the Alichur valley, you come to another lake - Yashilkul (green), formed at an altitude of 3734 meters by a landslide that struck eight centuries ago. Even today it looks as if it had just been poured into a foreign valley 22 kilometers long among exposed fawn steeps. Deep bays are separated by curtained capes, and above the whiteness of the 6-kilometer giant, Pathor Peak, shines. The lake has always attracted anglers. In 1979, Siberian peled was released into it.

Alichur flows into Yashilkul, and the Pyanj tributary Gunt flows out of it. The tract descends into its valley, having overcome two more passes. Here the Eastern Pamir landscapes end and the Western Pamirs begin: immeasurable depths open up, shady gorges open up, green bushes and gnarled birches appear. Isn’t this the most mountainous country we have - the topography is not cut so deeply and steeply anywhere! And on the whole Earth, perhaps, only in two places: in the Peruvian Andes and in the eastern Himalayas you can see such a depth of dissection of the mountains - the ridges rise 4-5 kilometers above the valleys, which are cut here to a level of 2 kilometers above the sea. There are countless rocky cliffs; there are planes a kilometer high, almost vertical.

The deepest furrow was dug by Panj, which divided the steep slopes of Badakhshan into approximately equal parts - our Western Pamir and Afghan Badakhshan. The cracks of the Pyanj itself and its right tributaries cut the first of them into large parallel ridges. The Obihingou valley in the upper reaches of the Vakhsh separated the extreme northwestern bastion of the Pamirs, the ridge of Peter the Great, from the Darvaz ridge.

The Western Pamirs are wetter than the Eastern Pamirs. Powerful glaciation could develop here, but the ridges are so narrow and the slopes are steep that usually only small hanging glaciers fit on them. Frequent earthquakes shake off not only snow, but also rock avalanches from the steep slopes. The championship among landslide-dammed lakes in both size and beauty is, of course, held by Lake Sarez.

In 1911, about 2 cubic kilometers of stone, weighing 6 billion tons, collapsed into the Murghab valley due to a seismic shock! The village of Usoi was buried under the collapse, and this tragic event was included in geology under the name of the Usoi collapse. A lake began to accumulate in front of a dam hundreds of meters high. By the end of the year, it flooded the Sarez village located higher up the valley, and three years later it swallowed up the valley for 70 kilometers. The narrowness of the gorge prevented the lake from spreading more than one and a half kilometers in width, and depths in it reached up to five hundred meters. Filtration through the dam prevented the water from overflowing (there were still 50 meters left before overflowing), and finally, by 1921, its surface stabilized at 3239 meters.

Lake Sarez and the blockage that gave birth to it are rare monuments of geological disasters of this size that arose before human eyes. A meeting with Sarez excites everyone who was lucky enough to get to him along the path from Yashil-kul or by helicopter. Some visitors are intoxicated by its “celestial blue,” others by its “cobalt blue,” comparable in thickness to dark blue ink, and those who spend an evening on the lake even remember the anthracite blackness of the waters. The frame of the lake is formed by reddish-brown, and higher on the slopes, reddish rocks, like wrinkles, riddled with dry hollows.

The lake has accumulated up to 15 cubic kilometers of water. But is a natural rockfill dam strong enough? Its breakthrough in the event of being undermined by underground runoff or the lake overflowing with new collapses of rocks overhanging it can lead to disastrous consequences. In a few hours, down the Bartang valley, and even lower, along the Amu Darya all the way to Termez, an all-washing flood wave will sweep through. Shouldn't the lake be drained at least 100 meters to reduce the danger?

Reclamation workers and power engineers look at Sarez with envy: it is both a supply of water for irrigation and a ready-made reservoir for a hydroelectric power station. They propose to pour the lake from its three-kilometer heights through a tunnel or bypass canal down the valley, where it will be warmer and where another, but obviously super-strong dam 300 meters high will allow the filling of a new, this time man-made Sarez, with a capacity equal to the natural one. It will be convenient to locate the water intake devices of the hydroelectric complex that feeds the irrigated lands, and powerful power plants will operate along the water drainage route.

The Pamir continues to rise and forces the rivers to tirelessly deepen their beds. There are extremely narrow or no floodplains here. Planes suitable for farming - dasht, arise only at the mouths of tributaries and on rare fragments of river terraces, which are “suspended” on steep slopes by balconies at a height of hundreds of meters above the channels.

And they bring soil to dashts in baskets!

From the villages, clinging to the slopes like swallows' nests, truly eagle horizons open up. Dizzying paths are laid along steep cliffs over abysses along narrow cornices and one-way balcony bridges - these are the famous ovrings. No less daring routes are drawn along the steep slopes with hanging irrigation canals, taking water high in the mountains and delivering it along the slopes to the mountain fields.

Mountain Tajiks cultivate naked barley, beans, peas, flax, and millet. With artificial irrigation, wheat and rye will be born, mulberries, apple trees, and apricots will bear fruit. The lower slopes are occupied by mountain semi-desert with thorny cushion-shaped bushes and rare “grass trees” - umbrella tall grass. The annual drive of sheep flocks to the overlying steppes and meadows sometimes requires acrobatic dexterity from both shepherds and animals.

The main source of the Pyanj - Vakhdzhir and its continuation Vakhandarya are located in Afghanistan. The Pamir River begins from Lake Zorkul, elevated to a height of 4125 meters. Having gurgled through a terrible gorge cut through the Vakhan ridge, it meets Vakhandarya, and together they form Pyanj proper. As far as Ishkashim, it flows southwest along the longitudinal valley separating the Wakhan Range from the foreign Hindu Kush, and from here it turns sharply to the north. The left bank here is the wild and formidable steeps of Afghan Badakhshan. On the right bank, where the mountains are equally huge, signs of development are clearly visible: electric lights powered by the power plant in Ishkashim, forest plantations, roads replacing former ovrings, irrigated fields...

The energy power of Pyanj is enormous. It is realistic to create giant hydroelectric power stations - Rushanskaya with a capacity of 3 million kilowatts and Dashtidzhumskaya - 4 million.

Descending along Panj to Khorog from the south, it would be a sin to miss one of famous places Pamir - Garm-Chashma. Let's turn into the canyon of one of the tributaries of the Pyanj and climb along it towards the white giant - Mayakovsky Peak. Among the bare rocks, the view opens to a staircase of petrified waterfalls - terraces of snow-white, yellowish or bluish calcareous tuff deposits with reservoirs filled with blue water. In places it bubbles and even gushes up to one and a half meters, forming microgeysers. At the springs with a temperature of 50 - 75° there is a hydropathic clinic, one of the highest in the world (at an altitude of about 3 kilometers). The luxurious cascades of sinter terraces are comparable to the world's treasures of natural architecture - the Mammoth terraces of Yellowstone Park in America and the New Zealand cascades of Tetarat - geysers were also the main architects of the masterpieces there.

Along one more gorge we will get to the anciently mined gems of the “ruby mountain” Kuhi-Lal (it was mentioned by Marco Polo, who also passed through here). In the old days, rubies were called frets, like yahonts, but crimson and amber-colored spinels are mined here, now with the help of modern mechanisms. And in the Pamirs there are also green-blue amazonites, honey-colored sphenes, blue and “tea” topazes, transparent scapolite, dark cherry rutile, jasper, mica, asbestos, talc... The extraction of many treasures is hampered by their sky-high inaccessibility. However, there is even a coal mine at an altitude of 5200 meters - this is higher than the peak of Kazbek. Coal here is given out not “to the mountain”, but from the mountain!

In the Shahdara valley, the deposits of the “heavenly stone” lajvar are famous - lapis lazuli, about which Marco Polo wrote that the best azure in the world is extracted from it. A pack path has been cut to the “blue gorge” of Lyajvar-dary at a 5-kilometer height, and the mined blocks of blue stone are transported by helicopters.

Poplar-decorated Khorog, the center of the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region and the highest of such centers, is located at a level of 2,200 meters. And a high-mountain botanical garden was created some 10 meters above Khorog. Here they breed plant varieties adapted to the harsh conditions of the highlands, help introduce fruit plantations and berry gardens into the economy, and cultivate forage herbs and vegetables.

The western part of the tract (Khorog - Dushanbe) is often called the Western Pamir. It is laid along the old caravan road, the movement along which took horsemen and packs up to 40 days. Now it is 550 kilometers of road route, the most difficult in profile (11 passes!) and replete with so many serpentines and dizzying cornices that drivers call it a slalom track. Khorog is connected to Dushanbe and by air, the flight takes only 45 minutes, but it is also associated with strong sensations. The plane, especially before descending in Khorog, follows the whimsical curves of the gorge, which narrows down to 50 meters in the “Rushan Window”, so the pilots call this path an aerial slalom route.

When Pyanj breaks through the Yazgulem ridge, at the site of the dam of the future Rushan hydroelectric power station, one is struck by the unusual combination of a huge, almost mirror-like surface, like that of lowland rivers, with a truly mountainous speed of flow. Traveler N.N. Sushkina called this part of Pyanj the Mountain Volga.

Towards the mouth of Yazgulem with dark brick water and further when crossing the gorge with the Vanch ridge, and below the mouth of Vanch the most spectacular part of the Panj gorges is located. The smooth planes of the plumbs rise hundreds of meters above the river, forming scenes, like scenery in 5-6 plans. The smooth surface of the river is interrupted by rapids cascades, deployed up to one and a half hundred meters along the front. Below the mouth of Vanch, the Pyanj, and with it the highway, rush to the northwest. But from the village of Kalai-Khumb, Pyanj goes southwest to the Dashtidzhum Gorge and Southern Tajikistan, while the tract climbs along the beautiful Rabotsky Gorge to the Darvaz pass at a height of 3270 meters. The path down the brick-red Obi-Hingou canyon coincides with the border between the Peter the Great ridge and the southern Tajik branches of the Gissar-Alai.

Mountains of Southern Turkmenistan. Great deserts are not entirely bordered by ridges. To the west of the branching Hissar-Alai, the mountains are interrupted by the Karakum, and further west the desert is again framed by mountains, only they no longer belong to Central Asia, but to Western Asia (the outlying ranges of the Iranian Plateau penetrate into the south of Turkmenistan). In the east you can see the edges of the North Afghan Paropamiz - the low mountains of Karabil and Badkhyz, to the west - the Kopetdag Mountains (the northern barrier of the Turkmen-Khorasan mountainous country) and “island” blocks of two Balkhanov. In essence, this is already part of Eastern Middle-earth.

The Kopetdag towers over Ashgabat, stooping, much more unattractive than the northern Tien Shan Alatau over Alma-Ata and Frunze. Only when viewed from a distance, from the desert, does it seem to grow, standing up to its full 2-3-kilometer height. And yet, Ashgabat residents are proud of Kopetdag and love to relax in its shady gorges and green valleys. The closest and most popular of them is Firyuza with its gardens, park and the legendary multi-stemmed plane tree “Seven Brothers”.

Steep-sloping and flat-topped ridges stretch for more than 600 kilometers, occupying a width of up to 175 in the west and only 20-50 kilometers in the southeast. The border divides the mountains into Soviet and Iranian parts: their northwestern third belongs almost entirely to the Soviet Union, the remaining two thirds belong to Iran.

The northeastern base of the mountains is drawn as if along a ruler, separating them from the flat Karakum. This is a trace of a moving suture along which the Kopetdag was raised above its foothill trough and even pushed onto it. From the cracks that form a whole “thermal zone” here, warm springs gush out, including the cave lake Coe near Baharden and the healing waters of the Archman resort.

The Forward Chain, sawn into many links by gorges, is just as straight. It is separated from the other ridges by a vast trough - the Greater Kopetdag Valley. But the border ridges lying behind it follow the same trend only in the southeast. To the west of the Nokhur clustering node they bend, forming an independent arc, convex to the north. The huge neighboring mountain arcs of Elburz and Paropamiz are joined in it - on the map they look like garlands sagging to the south. Here the Kopetdag ridges diverge: the border ridges stretch to the southwest, towards Elburz, and the forward chain steadily follows to the northwest. The rivers of the Atrek basin flow in the longitudinal valleys between the branching ridges, the main one is Sumbar.

There are no Alpine-style jagged ridges here. Even the highest of them (2.5-3 kilometers) during periods of former glaciations barely reached the snow line. Each major ridge is accompanied by parallel, lower ridges. The frames of their ridges form the steps of huge staircases - witnesses to the succession of stages of leveling and uplifting. From the most ancient stage, even pre-Quaternary, the Siberian ridge plateau has been preserved - its name speaks of the severity of the climate. And the youngest steps, the foothills, are raised trails of foothills, intricately cut by a dense network of ravines - bairs, tiers of bad lands.

During the kilometer-long recent uplifts, the corrugation continued - the arches of the ridges grew faster, and the valleys lagged behind. There was also movement along the cracks. During the earthquake in May 1929, Mount Dushak rose so much that in the Sekizyaba gorge that cuts through it, a dammed lake remained for many years, which arose in front of the all-stone threshold.

On the night of October 5-6, 1948, the Kopetdag trembled even more. At the epicenter there were 10 points, but 8-9 was enough to destroy most of the buildings in Ashgabat. Even many years later, one cannot read without emotion about the days of disaster, the scale of destruction and casualties, about the enormous assistance provided to the population of the collapsed city.

It was folded into folds by the Meso-Cenozoic, which means that the Kopet Dag is a very young folded structure. Massive angular forms are hewn out of Cretaceous limestones and sandstones, and bad lands are carved out of Cretaceous and Paleogene marls and clays, as well as from younger loose rocks. The last pre-Quaternary advance of the Caspian Sea penetrated into the western valleys.

The sedimentary layers contain barite and witherite. But the main wealth of the subsoil is water. Before the construction of the Karakum Canal, their underground plume, penetrating under the sloping plain, was the only source of water for the foothill oases of Turkmenistan and its capital. Although irrigation ditches “carried the murmur from the mountains” through the streets, everyone knew that the main moisture here was extracted from underground, with the help of kariz - damp and gloomy galleries, fixed from the surface by chains of wells.

And yet, the strip of foothill oases has been inhabited since ancient times. In ancient times, here was the city of Nisa, the heart of the power that began to rise - Parthia; All that remains of it today is a pale-gray settlement uncovered by excavations with valuable traces of ancient (Parthian) and later (medieval) culture.

Now the landscape of the Kopetdag oases has changed dramatically. Of course, Ashgabat, as before, endures 40-degree heat and dust storms, but how much easier it is to endure them with an abundance of shady greenery and water! The karizs were replaced by boreholes. But the main drinker of the foothills is the already mentioned “Karakum Darya” canal.

The intramountain valleys of the west are more modestly supplied with water. This is unfortunate: after all, in the middle Sumbar, in the Karakala region, subtropical crops can be cultivated. Here in the surrounding valleys there is a world of lush forest gardens, the eastern avant-garde of the Hyrcanian (northern Iranian) mountain-forest landscapes, penetrating deep into the mountains like bright green tentacles. More than 40 species of wild fruit thrive in these valleys and form forests even more lush than in the south of the Gissar-Alai and Tien Shan - here the Hyrcanian center of distribution of pre-Quaternary relicts is closer. The groves of walnuts, figs, pomegranates, wild apple trees, pears, plums, medlars are magnificent - all this is entwined with wild grapes (and perhaps wild ones since Parthian times).

The main miracle of the Sumbar Valley is not a tree, but a completely inconspicuous herb from the nightshade family, discovered in 1938 by the botanist O. F. Mizgireva, which turned out to be a new species of mandrake, unknown in the world flora - a mysterious plant of doctors of Tibet and Middle-earth. Tonic, vitamin-rich, medicinal, similar to ginseng (even the root of both resembles a human figurine), this plant turned out to be a relative of tomato, potato, henbane, nightshade - it resembles them in the shape of the stem and leaves, and tomato and fruit, but combines the aroma and taste of tomato, melon and pineapple. Unfortunately, it has not yet been possible to introduce this miracle into culture.

To protect the relict forests of Sumbar, thinned by logging and grazing, the Syunt-Khosardag Nature Reserve was created.

An incredible landscape of naked mountain desert opens up on the road from Kizyl-Arvat to Karakala. The layers visible in the oblique cuts of the folds are colored so brightly and variegatedly that, if depicted in painting, they would resemble abstract paintings. The relief forms also look fantastic: a dense network of dry ravines, filled with water only during episodic - once every few years - downpours, cut the surface into small ridges, pyramids, cones, tightly pressed one against the other and as if cut with a comb. There are snow-white ridges, there are green, bluish, red, gray... A dead desert of clown-colored obelisks and domes, stretching for many kilometers.

In the upper parts of the slopes of the border ridges, among the mountain steppes, juniper forests are found, and in the east, pistachio woodlands; In some places the landscape can be called mountain forest-steppe. There are vast expanses of prickly, hedgehog-like cushions and tracts of large grasses with umbrella grasses taller than human height. Astragalus cushions and ferula “herbal trees” are valuable as sources of resins - gums, important medicinal and technical raw materials.

To protect mountain semi-deserts, steppes and areas of juniper woodlands in the Central Kopetdag, the Kopetdag Nature Reserve was created.

The fauna of the Kopetdag is varied and exotic - it has many species in common with the neighboring mountains of Central Asia, Transcaucasia, the Iranian Plateau and even India. In the gorges of Sumbar in the first half of this century, the Turanian tiger was encountered (its last visit to us from Iran was noted in 1970).

Eastern links of the mountain strip of Southern Turkmenistan - Badkhyz and Karabil- massifs of hilly and ridged bad lands, and partly low mountains with heights of up to a kilometer. Badkhyz is separated from Kopetdag by the through gorge of the Tedzhen River, which in this section of its course, bordering Iran, is called by the name of its Afghan headwaters - Harirud. And Badkhyz and Karabil are separated from each other by another through valley - it was cut through by the Murgab River, Tejen’s neighbor. The semi-desert alternates with open forests - the “pistachio savanna”.

The pistachio, which Badkhyz is especially proud of, is not just a nut-bearing tree that produces tasty nuts, but also a source of technical raw materials. Oil, resin for making varnishes and paints, tanning agents, and medicines are obtained from the nuts. She is a champion of drought resistance: her widely spread roots help her survive in the mountain desert, which is why trees cannot grow close to each other.

The Badkhyz Nature Reserve protects honorary members of the Red Book - the gazelle and the main pride of these places - the kulan, a wild relative of the horse and donkey, large-headed and fleet-footed. It once lived in the steppes of Ukraine and Kazakhstan, but now it is preserved in its wild form only here.

Transcaspian plains and ridges— western links of the uplifts of Southern Turkmenistan. Both Balkhan and the Krasnovodsk plateau, although they lie on the direct northwestern extension of the Kopetdag, differ from it primarily in the greater antiquity of their subsoil. Here, fragments of the Karakum plate, the folded base of which was crushed back in the Mesozoic, are pushed up in the form of blocks. And the adjacent plains are very young troughs, only recently freed from under the waters of the Caspian Sea.

Small and Big Balkhans are separated by the lower reaches of the dry riverbed of the Uzboy. The low-mountainous Small Balkhan does not reach even 800 meters, and the Big Balkhan rises to almost 2 kilometers. The slopes of both are densely cut, like bad soil, by ravines and pitted by karst-type sinkholes. But the karst here is not in limestones or gypsum. Subsidence in dry climates is also characteristic of marly-clayey soils; this is a special karst - clayey. Both blocks are raised the latest movements simultaneously with the Kopetdag, so their relief differs little from its ridges, the depths of which were crushed much later. And there is a lot of Kopetdag in the appearance of the landscape here.

Adjacent to the foothills of the Big Balkhan is an area of ​​generous oil content. Among the dry lake Babakhodzha, the salts of which are still being mined, surrounded by the flat salt marsh Kelkor, where the Uzboy River that flowed here once ended, a modest hill rises. The first oil field was discovered here back in 1931. Oil Mountain, Neftedag, became the core of the oil-industrial region. Near Balkhan itself, on the path of dashing intermountain drafts, a well-greened city of Nebit-Dag, surprising for a recently wild desert, grew up. Of course, he did not have enough water, but now a water pipeline from the Karakum Canal has already been laid here. And yet, with all the greenery, the city feels as if in hell: the sun, the hot winds, and the slopes of the black mountain, Big Balkhan, breathing heat like from an oven, are to blame here.

Hidden nearby in a frame of poplars and reeds salt Lake Mollacar A. The resort uses its healing mud. And the Boyadag hill surprised us with a geyser sporadically gushing from a well. Along Balkhansky blinders The Ashgabat-Krasnovodsk railway goes to the sea.

The Balkhano-Kopet Dag swell plunges towards the Caspian Sea, continuing further in an underwater threshold, the transition to which on the shore is marked by a protrusion of land. The edges of the plateau on this Krasnovodsk Peninsula are dissected into steep festoons. The main seaport of Turkmenistan, the city of Krasnovodsk, arose on a rocky terrace between the cliffs and the sea. Its predecessor, the village of Uzun-Ada, was destroyed by an earthquake in 1895, after which the port was moved to its current location.

The city needs water. He took part of it from Nebit-Dag, received part of it from water carriers, and desalinated part of it from the Caspian Sea. But the Karakum Canal is already supplying a stream of water here too.

To the south of the Krasnovodsk Bay there is an amphibious landscape - from here the sea left only in the 30s. The Cheleken Peninsula arose from former island: the drying out of the Caspian Sea contributed to its attachment to land. Cheleken is oil-bearing; for a long time it produced mountain wax - ozokerite, rock salt, and mineral ocher. They beat here mineral springs, bubbling mud volcanoes. Associated waters flowing with oil provide iodine and bromine. And oil is also extracted at sea, on the Turkmen “Oil Rocks” - this is how offshore oil production installations are called here, following the example of the well-known ones in Baku.

The pile buildings that saved the water from wind surges look funny. Now the sea has gone, but the piled buildings remain, as if standing on tiptoe just in case.

Once upon a time, the plain was irrigated by canals from the high-water Atrek. The majestic ruins of Messerian, one of the cities of medieval Dakhistan, which existed for one and a half millennia, have survived to this day. Now the Atrek is drying up at its mouth, so it was necessary to dig a 26-kilometer canal to the retreated sea in order to return the river spawning grounds for Caspian fish.

The lower reaches of the Atrek are a unique region of our dry subtropics. Only here the date palm bears fruit! The experimental station in Kizyl-Atrek cultivates dozens of dry subtropical plants - olives, figs, almonds, pomegranate, and even tropical ones - cacti, ornamental palms. Vegetables grow all year round in open ground. The subtropics will bloom with the arrival of water from the Karakum Darya; it will also transform the entire Messerian plain.

The tugai forests of the lower reaches and delta of the Atrek are dense and impassable - there are walls of cattails and reeds, thickets of tamarisk, entwined with vines of clematis and pavoya. Wild boars live in these jungles, and back in the 1930s tigers came here to feast on them. In the Atrek tugai, on former day of the shrunken Gasankuli Bay and along the coast of the Caspian Sea there are protected lands and waters - “winter quarters” for hordes of birds. Both the land and coastal waters of the Caspian Sea are protected. The Gasankuli reserve, when its own bay dried out, was expanded towards the Cheleken and Krasnovodsk bays and made part of the larger Krasnovodsk reserve, which exceeded 2.5 thousand square kilometers. More than 160 species of waterfowl, wading and other birds winter here, including swan, flamingo, gray goose. WITH far north Red-breasted goose, white-fronted goose, tundra herring gull and falcon arrive.

Winter concentrations of birds near Gasankuli are a force of nature! Their density and abundance make one remember bird colonies. Flocks of flamingos are compared to pink clouds, pink foam...

We would like to thank the authors for the photographs used in the design of this page:

is not only a unique culture, but also beautiful nature. On the territory of this part of the world there are seas and steppes, plains for many thousands of kilometers and the highest peaks of the world, which occupy ¾ of the land. The latter will be discussed in our rating.

Except for the famous mountain world - Everest, in Central and Central Asia there are many other peaks that were widely covered in cinema and literature and which took the lives of unwary travelers. There are relatively few mountains favorable to climbers, but they become a popular platform for various kinds of records. We present to you a list of the 10 highest mountains in Asia.

10. Annapurna, 8091 m

This mountain is known from a bad point of view - it is believed that it is during its conquest that most climbers die. So, at some point the mortality rate reached a record 32%. But exactly on Annapurna more than half a century ago, the first ascent among all the “eight-thousanders” was made.

The peak owes its unusual name to Sanskrit - from this language its name is translated as “ Goddess of fertility" The living world here is truly diverse thanks to the nearby river, but you won’t be able to enjoy it for long - changeable weather and constantly forming avalanches will ruin the mood of unwary travelers.

9. Nanga Parbat, 8125 m

Unfortunately, the mountain Nanga Parbat also known as the killer peak: it has collected a large number of accidents that occurred while climbing it.

Interesting that the first climber who tried to conquer the mountain became its first victim. Since then, more than 400 people have died on the slopes of the peak.

It is curious that the causes of death were not always avalanches or carelessness during mountaineering. So, 6 years ago there was a terrorist attack on the athletes’ camp, which led to casualties. At the same time, the peak several times became the “main character” of documentaries of different years.

8. Manaslu, 8156 m

Now to the mountain Manaslu You can climb 10 different routes. The summit is a favorite place for setting records, the latest of which was recorded quite recently: an Italian climber was the first woman to overcome the descent of alpine skiing.

Manaslu also had a lot of casualties: travelers suffered from avalanches that buried them, as well as from their own carelessness when they fell into one of the many crevices.

However, a National Park has been formed at the top, along which there is a hiking trail. This trip will take about 2 weeks.

7. Dhaulagiri, 8167 m

Mountain Dhaulagiri is main peak mountain range of the same name in the Himalayas. It is interesting that this particular mountain is characterized by relatively little glaciation, which means that it is somewhat safer to conquer it than others.

In addition, at the beginning of the 19th century, Dhaulagiri was considered the highest point in the world, and therefore expeditions to it were undertaken with enviable regularity. But success was not achieved immediately - only in the middle of the 20th century was the mountain conquered on the eighth attempt.

The unusual name is explained by the appearance of the “snow-white giant” - from Sanskrit Dhaulagiri is translated as “ White Mountain».

6. Cho Oyu, 8201 m

This is one of the favorite peaks for climbers. As of the early 2000s, it has been conquered more than 3,000 times, and this number is steadily growing every year. Only Everest is more popular. At the same time, the number of victims does not exceed 2%, which makes the peak one of the safest in our ranking.

Now you can get to the top by 15 different routes, the first of which was laid more than half a century ago. Even young athletes decide to undertake the expedition - 5 years ago a 16-year-old boy set the record, and in 2019, Cho Oyu was climbed by his peer from Australia.

5. Makalu, 8462 m

Long time top Makalu remained unconquered, so the glory of one of the most difficult mountains over 8000 m was firmly established. It was known to people since the middle of the 19th century, but the first expedition was undertaken only a century later - climbers then never reached the highest point.

A year later, travelers were able to conquer the peak, even calling it “ mountain of happiness“- it is believed that the group was lucky with the weather, so it was not difficult for them to climb Makalu.

Now there are 15 routes leading to Makalu, the most difficult of which, from a technical point of view, was laid by a Russian team. This cost the group of athletes several victims, including the captain.

4. Lhotse, 8516 m

Mountain Lhotse marks the border between China and Nepal. Travelers discovered this peak relatively recently: the first expedition took place only 60 years ago, and the middle mountain of the chain was discovered in the early 2000s. Therefore, to this day there are significantly fewer routes to Lhotse than to its neighbors.

The total number of ascents is also quite modest and does not exceed 300, and the number of victims is 9 climbers.
At the same time, Lhotse is considered a beautiful peak, but difficult to climb - all because of the large number of rocky ridges that appear every now and then as soon as athletes overcome the 8,000-meter mark.

3. Kanchenjunga, 8586 m

A special National Park has been formed around this mountain range, located both in Nepal and in Nepal. The name of the mountain translates as " Five Treasures from the Great Snow": the massif consists of 5 picturesque peaks. In literature, each of them was assigned its own treasures - grain, sacred books, weapons, salt and gold. But the travelers who climbed there more often encountered death than unknown gifts.

So, in Nepal there is a legend that Kanchenjunga has the strongest feminine energy, so it “kills” all climbers. The first woman to descend from the summit alive set this record only in 1998. However, the number of victims on the mountain is still growing, while with other peaks there is a downward trend in mortality.

2. K2, 8612 m

Legendary mountain Chogori, or as most people know it K2, is considered a “wild mountain” among athletes due to the difficulty of the climb. It is almost impossible to climb it from China, so most often attempts are made from Pakistan. But even there, luck is not always on the side of climbers - the mortality rate exceeded 23% and continues to rise.

Climbing K2 is considered technically more difficult than even Everest, so out of 280 people more than 66 died. Chogori can be conquered only in the summer; none of the groups that went there in winter were able to accomplish their plans.

1. Everest, 8848 m

Qomolungma, or Everest They still know it from school. This is the most record peak on the planet, rising 8848 meters above sea level. Expeditions to it are organized constantly, and this despite all the difficulties: the climb takes at least 2 months, athletes lose 15 kilograms per trip.

The leaders of the countries on whose territory the mountain range is located have introduced some mandatory fees - both for the ascent itself and for Additional services for travelers. Commercial firms also make money by providing equipment and instructors. There are so many people interested that expeditions even have their own order - so people sign up for a trip to Everest long before the required date.

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The highest mountains in the world are more than 8 kilometers in height - these are peaks that are impressive. Passenger planes fly at this altitude (8-12 kilometers). In fact, there are many more such mountains than fourteen. But only those that are separated from each other by a significant distance are taken into account. All major eight-thousanders are located in Central Asia. Nepal, China, Pakistan, India. I wonder if this is the will of the gods or is it connected to something?

Not everyone can conquer at least one peak of the “14 gods”, but there are those on our planet who strive to conquer all fourteen! At the moment there were only 41 people, out of more than 9 billion people on the planet. It’s hard to say why height attracts them, perhaps with only one thing: “...height, height, height...”.

It should be added that there is such a thing as “pure ascent,” that is, climbers made the ascent without using oxygen masks. For reference, even commercial airliners often fly regularly at lower altitudes.
More than 10 thousand ascents have been made to the great 8 thousand peaks.

About 7 percent of all climbs ended tragically. The bodies of many dead climbers remained at the heights they had not conquered, due to the difficulty of evacuating them. Some of them serve as landmarks for modern conquerors of certain heights. For example, the height of 8500 meters on Everest for 17 years greeted climbers with the body of Tsewang Palzhor, who died on it in 1996. It even received an unofficial name - “Green Shoes”, this is the exact color of the shoes the deceased climber was wearing. Why are we so attracted by unconquered heights? Everyone has their own answer to this question.

Another known name is Chomolungma (from Tibetan “ Chomolangma" means "Divine" or "Mother". The highest point in the world and the most “prestigious” peak on our “blue” planet. Its height is 8848 meters above sea level. Its English name “Everest” was given in honor of the head of the geodetic survey of British India, Sir George Everest.

Where is Everest

Everest is located on several hundred square kilometers, on the territory of mainly two states - Nepal and China. Chomolungma is part of the Himalaya mountain system, the Mahalangur Himal range (in the part called the Khumbu Himal). Perhaps no other peak on our planet attracts people to conquer it like Chomolungma.

Climbing Everest

The mountain was first conquered on May 29, 1953 by Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and New Zealander Edmund Hillary.

Since the “ascending travelers” were counted, about three hundred people have already died. Even the most modern equipment and equipment do not allow all the thirsty inhabitants of our planet to conquer this height.
About five thousand people try to conquer Everest every year. By 2018, more than 8,400 climbers managed to reach the summit, almost three and a half thousand of them climbed Everest more than once.

Climbing Everest takes about 2 months - with acclimatization and setting up camps. Climbers lose on average 10-15 kilograms of their weight during this time.

The most dangerous section of the climb is considered to be the last 300 meters to the top. Not all climbers can overcome this part. At the top there are often strong winds of up to 200 km/h. And the temperature throughout the year ranges from 0°C to -60°C.

Second highest mountain in the world, Chogori (K2)

Chogori (second name K2) is the second highest peak on the planet, but climbing it is considered much more difficult. Moreover, in winter, no one managed to conquer it at all, and the mortality rate when climbing this peak is the highest and amounts to 25%. Only a few hundred climbers managed to conquer this height.
In 2007, it was Russian climbers who managed to climb the most difficult section of the peak, the Western Wall, and they did it without the use of oxygen equipment. The most massive conquest of Chogori took place in the summer of 2018. Of the group, which consisted of 63 people, one died. At the same time, Andrzej Bargiel became the first climber to ski down from the top of this mountain.

Kanchenjunga

Kanchenjaga is the third highest eight-thousander on the planet. Located in the Himalayas. Until the mid-19th century, it was considered the highest mountain peak, but now, after calculations, it ranks third in height. At the moment, more than ten routes to climb this peak have been laid. Translated from Tibetan, the name of the mountain means “treasury of the five great snows.”

Due to its location, Kanchenjaga partially belongs to the national park of the same name in India. If you look at the mountain from India, you will notice that there are five peaks in this mountain range. Moreover, four out of five peaks rise to a height of more than eight thousand meters. Their combination forms a very colorful landscape, so this mountain is considered the most picturesque among its kind. One of the favorite places of creation of Nicholas Roerich.

The first conquest of this peak belongs to the English climbers Joe Brown and George Bend. It was committed on May 25, 1955. In Nepal, for a long period of time, there was a legend about Kanchenjaga - a mountain woman who does not allow the fair sex to conquer her peak. Only in 1998 did the British Ginette Harrison manage to do this. The general trend towards a decrease in the mortality rate when conquering mountain peaks unfortunately did not affect Kanchenjaga and is 22 percent.

Lhotse

Lhotse, Mountain peak on the border of China and Nepal, has a height of 8516 meters. The mountain is located in close proximity to Chomolungma, the distance between them does not exceed 3 kilometers. They are separated by the South Col pass, the highest point of which almost reaches eight thousand. Such proximity of two great peaks creates a very majestic picture. From a certain angle you can see that Lhotse is like a triangular pyramid. Moreover, for each of these three faces at the moment there is the smallest number of climbing routes. This is largely due to the fact that the slopes of the peaks are very steep, and the likelihood of avalanches is extremely high.

Unlike Chogori, this peak was still conquered in winter. It is worth noting that so far none of the individual climbers or groups have been able to climb the traverse of all three peaks of this eight-thousander. The Eastern Wall of Lhotse also remains unconquered.

Makalu

Makalu is extraordinary beautiful peak, but extremely difficult to climb. Less than 30% of organized expeditions ended in success. The mountain is located on the border of China and Nepal, just over 20 km southeast of Everest.

The mountain did not attract much attention for more than a hundred years after it was marked on maps. This is largely due to the desires of previous expeditions to conquer higher peaks located in close proximity to it. The peak was first conquered only in 1955.

In certain circles the mountain is known as the “black giant”. This name was assigned to it due to the fact that the extremely sharp ribs of the peak do not allow snow to settle on them, and it often appears before its contemplators as black granite rocks. Since the mountain is located on the border of two eastern countries, its conquest is related to mystical factors, supposedly the mountain itself decides which of the expeditions is allowed to climb and who is not worthy of this fact.

Cho Oyu

The height of Cho Oyu is a little over 8200 meters. Near the peak lies the Nangpa-La pass, through which the main “trade route” of the Sherpas from Nepal to Tibet passes. Thanks to this route, many climbers consider this peak to be the most accessible of all eight-thousanders, although this is not entirely true. Just on the Nepal side there is a very steep and complex wall, so most of the ascents are carried out from the Tibet side.
The weather in the Cho Oyu area is almost always favorable for climbing, and its “accessibility” makes this peak like a springboard before climbing Everest.

Dhaulagiri I

The number one perfectly reflects the essence of the name of the mountain; it consists of many ridges, the highest of which reaches a height of 8167 meters. It is believed that the mountain has 11 peaks, of which only one is higher than 8000 meters, the rest lie between 7 and 8 kilometers. Dhaulagiri is located in the central part of Nepal and belongs to the Main Himalayan Range.

Despite the complexity of the title, it is translated very simply “ white mountain" The history of its conquest is interesting. Until the 30s of the 19th century, it was considered the most high mountain on the planet. But they started conquering the peak only in the middle of the last century. For a long time it was impregnable, only the eighth expedition managed to reach the top. Like its other brothers, this peak has its own simpler routes and very inaccessible slopes.

Manaslu

The mountain is located in the northern part of Nepal and reaches a height of 8163 meters. Due to its relative seclusion, this peak looks extremely majestic against the backdrop of the surrounding splendor. Maybe this explains its name, which means “mountain of spirits.” For a long time, climbing the mountain was difficult due to hostile local residents(the name of the mountain speaks about this). Avalanches often fell on local settlements, and only after long offerings to the highest gods did the Japanese expedition finally manage to conquer this peak. The mortality rate among climbers conquering Manaslu reaches almost 18 percent.

The mountain itself and its surroundings are part of the Nepal National Park of the same name. The indescribable beauty of the park prompted the country's authorities to create a walking route for lovers of mountain recreation.

Nanga Parbat (Nanga Parbat)

One of the few eight-thousanders located not in China or Nepal, but in territory controlled by Pakistan. There are four main peaks on the mountain, the highest of which is 8125 meters. The top of the mountain is among the top three in terms of the number of deaths during its conquest.

In terms of the history of the ascent, an interesting fact is that it was on this mountain that the first attempt to climb an eight-thousander was made. This happened back in 1895. The first conquest of the peak alone, and not as part of a prepared expedition, is associated with this mountain. There are beliefs that it was here that the symbols of Nazi Germany, whose representatives, as you know, were close to the occult sciences, were first noticed.

Certain difficulties in planning expeditions to this peak are caused by internal political disagreements on the territory of Pakistan.

Annapurna I is the most dangerous peak among eight-thousanders

Annapurna I is the first of the eight-thousander peaks, whose height is already below 8100 meters (officially 8091 meters). However, for all the years of climbing taken into account, she has the highest mortality rate among conquerors, almost one in three (32%). Although at present it is steadily declining from year to year. Annapurna is located in central Nepal and the entire mountain range stretches for more than 50 kilometers. Consists of many ridges of varying heights. From the highest points of Annapurna you can observe another giant - Jaulaguri, about 30 kilometers between them.

If you fly near these mountains by plane, you will see a majestic view of the nine main ridges of this massif. It is part of the national park of the same name, located in Nepal. There are several walking routes, along which indescribable views of the Annapurna peaks open.

Gasherbrum I

The summit of Gasherbrum I is part of the Baltoro Muztagh mountain range. Its height is 8080 meters and it is the eleventh eight-thousander on the planet. It is located in Pakistan-controlled territory near the border with China. Translated it means " beautiful mountain" It also has another name - Hidden Peak, which translated from English means hidden peak. In general, the Karakoram mountain system, to which Gasherbrum belongs, has seven peaks, and three of them exceed 8 thousand meters, although not by much.

The first ascent of the peak dates back to 1958, and in 1984 the famous climber Reinhold Messner makes a traverse between Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II.

Broad Peak

The second highest peak in Karakurum, the middle brother between the two sisters Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II. In addition, literally 8 kilometers from Broad Peak there is another high relative - Mount Chogori. The first ascent of Broad Peak took place a year earlier than neighboring Gasherbrum I, in 1957

It itself consists of two peaks – Pre-summit and Main (8047 meters). The southwestern slopes are much easier than the opposite, northeastern ones, and it is on them that the classic routes to the Main Peak are laid.

Gasherbrum II

Just below Broad Peak there is another peak among the eight-thousanders - Gasherbrum II (height 8035 meters). Either its relative lowness affected it, or for another reason, but the first ascent to this peak dates back to a year earlier than on Broad Peak, in 1956. The main routes of peak conquerors pass along its southwestern slope. It is least susceptible to mountain falls and avalanches. It is used by many climbers who begin to conquer everything above 8 kilometers.

This mountain fully justifies its name, in good weather the boundaries between gray and black limestone rocks are clearly visible, corresponding to different age boundaries, which, in combination with crystal clear snow, creates unique landscapes.

Shishabangma

The majestic iceberg with a height of 8027 meters is the lowest of all known eight-thousanders. Located in the Himalayas, in China. It consists of three peaks, two of which - Main and Central (8008 meters) exceed 8 kilometers. Translated from the Tibetan language it means “harsh climate”.

The first conquest of this peak was made by a Chinese expedition in May 1964. It is considered one of the least difficult peaks, although more than 20 climbers have died on its slopes over the past years.

The highest mountains in the world on the world map

This is what it looks like short review all 14 eight-thousanders on the planet. Each mountain is unique in its own way and the saying applies to each of them: “only mountains can be better than mountains.”

Asian countries: large and small. The most big mountains, islands, rivers and lakes of the continent

Asia is the largest area (44,579,000 km2) and the most populated part of the world (3.88 billion inhabitants) of planet Earth. Together with Europe, it forms a single (not separated by straits) continent of Eurasia, which is connected by the Isthmus of Suez to Africa, and is separated from North America by the rather narrow Bering Strait (maximum width is only 86 km). Asia is washed by the waters of all four oceans: the Pacific, Indian, Arctic and Atlantic (Mediterranean Sea).

• There are enough wonders of the world in Asia, both those that Mother Nature gave to humanity, like Halong Bay in Vietnam or the wonderful ones in Thailand, and those that were created by man

Some, like the Great Wall of China or, are very famous, others - not so much, and some (for example, in Japan, the Sigiriya Palace on a cliff in Sri Lanka, the imperial residence in Hue in Vietnam), are still considered attractions of the regional level, although they clearly deserve more!

Asian countries (47 states):

• Most of Asia's population is concentrated in countries such as China (PRC): over 1.3 billion people, and India: 1.1 billion people, which are the most populous on the planet.

Geography of Asia: mountains, rivers, lakes and islands

Asia is the highest mountainous part of the world: the average height of the territory is 950 meters. Basic mountain ranges cross the continent approximately in the middle: in the southwest-northeast direction. The highest plateau, the Tibetan plateau, rises approximately 4,500 meters above the surface of the world's oceans and covers an area of ​​about 2.5 million sq. km.

• Here is also the world's highest mountain system, the Himalayas (which translated from Sanskrit means “dwelling, shelter of snow”), which includes 17 (!) of the highest mountains on the planet. The Chinese-Nepalese Chomolungma (or Everest, 8848 meters), the Pakistani K-2 (Chogo Gangri, 8611 meters) and the Indian-Nepalese Kangchenjunga (Kangchen Dzö-nga, 8586 meters) top this impressive list

Asia is also home to many volcanoes, most of which are active. Among the most famous we highlight:

• Klyuchevskaya Sopka volcano in Kamchatka is the highest of active volcanoes Eurasia (4750 meters). It remains highly active to this day. The last recorded eruption occurred in 2007
• The Indonesian one (Krakatoa), which once “ate” itself, is also world famous. It was once located on the island of the same name, located between Java and Sumatra, and in 1883 it erupted with a powerful eruption (on the nuclear scale equal to approximately 200 megatons), which was heard even in Perth, Australia, 3,100 kilometers away.

The sky even over Europe was painted an ominous red for a long time due to clouds of ash raised into the atmosphere - the famous Norwegian artist Munch even dedicated it to this. By the way, another eruption of Krakatau (in 1927) “gave birth” to a small (about 2 km in diameter) volcanic island called “Son of Krakatau” (Anak Krakatau). He grows quickly and, like his parent, has a violent temperament

Let's also mention:

Pusuk Buhit, Lake Toba, Indonesia

• Tomboro (Tambora or Tomboro), also located in Indonesia and in 1815, during an eruption (supposedly the most powerful in recent history), destroyed more than 70 thousand inhabitants of the island of Sumbawa
• Indonesian (Lake Toba), which is also a supervolcano and occupies an area of ​​about 100 by 30 km. The largest volcano lake in the world. It is believed that the massive eruption of this volcano approximately 70-75 thousand years ago led to global climate change
• An entire volcanic region is also in Indonesia, which is a popular tourist attraction in the country mainly because of its pristine landscape from the series “This is how the Earth was born”

Mount Fuji in Japan

• (Fuji), considered one of the three Japanese " Sacred Mountains” and having a relatively “meek” disposition. The last recorded eruption dates back to 1707-1708. Fuji is located very close to the Japanese capital, Tokyo, is very loved by tourists and is therefore positioned as one of the main attractions of the “Land of the Rising Sun”.

Any tourist can climb this mountain today - in the summer season!

The Asian continent includes a large number of islands. The largest of them are Indonesian Borneo (the third largest, 743,330 km2, after Papua New Guinea island in the world) and Sumatra (470,000 km2). And the most populated: Indonesian Java (124 million inhabitants according to 2005 estimates) and Japanese Honshu (103 million people).

, Sri Lanka

Part Asian countries located exclusively on the islands: Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, Cyprus, Maldives, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Philippines and Japan and have no territories on the continent.

• The largest peninsulas of Asia: Hindustan (or the subcontinent of India, with an area of ​​4,480,000 sq. km), the Arabian Peninsula, the Indochina Peninsula, the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Korean Peninsula

The most big rivers continental Asia

• Chinese Yangtze (with a length of 6300 km - 3rd in the world after the South American Amazon and the African Nile)
• Russian river system Yenisei-Angara-Selenga (5540 km)
• Chinese Yellow River (“Yellow River”, 5464 km)
• Russian river system Ob-Irtysh (5410 km)
• Russian-Chinese-Mongolian river system Amur-Argun (4444 km)
• Russian Lena (4400 km).

All these rivers and river systems are included in the list of the ten largest on planet Earth.

The most big lakes Asia

• The Caspian Sea (with an area of ​​371,000 km2) is a colossal body of salt water that is recognized by various sources as either a sea or a lake
• (37,500 km2), in addition to being the deepest lake in the world (1,470 meters) and the largest body of water in terms of fresh water volume (23,600 cubic km)
• Balkhash (18,428 km2).

It is noteworthy that all of these reservoirs are fully or partially located on the territory former USSR(Union of Soviet Socialist Republics).

They occupy mountains and plateaus. Also, the mountains of Asia are the highest in the world - here, in Asia in the Himalayas, is the highest point of our planet - Mount Chomolunga (Everest). Its height is 8882 m.

The highest mountains are located in south asia and in the south of Central Asia - these are the mountain systems of the Himalayas, Pamirs, Hindu Kush, Tien Shan, and Tibetan Plateau. In the north of Asia there are lower mountains - these are the Central Siberian Plateau, the Stanovoye Highlands, the Chersky Range, the Verkhoyansk Range, the Sredinny Range, and the Altai Mountains. In the east there are mountains such as the Greater and Lesser Khingan and the Sikhote-Alin. In the western part of Asia, on its border with Europe, there are mountains such as the Caucasus and the Urals.

The Himalayas are the most high mountains in Asia and in the world. They are located on the border of South and East Asia and separate the lowlands of the Indus and Ganges Rivers from the Tibetan Plateau. In the northwest the Himalayas are bordered by another high mountain system Asia - Hindu Kush. The length of the Himalayas is more than 2400 km, and the width is about 200-300 km. The steepest slopes of the Himalayas face south, towards the valleys of the Indus and Ganges rivers. From Tibet, the Himalayas look flatter. In total, there are 130 peaks in the Himalayas, which rise to a height of more than 7000m. 11 mountains in the Himalayas are over 8,000 meters high. They are predominantly found in the Nepal Himalayas, the highest part of this mountain system. Among them: Mount Everest (8882 m), Mount Kapchenjunga (8598 m), Makalu (8470 m), Apnapurna (8078 m), Gosainthan (8018 m), Dhaulagiri (8172 m), Cho Oyu (8180 m), Shisha -Pangma (8013 m), Manaslu (8128 m), Lhotse Main (8501 m), etc.

The second highest mountain range after the Himalayas in Asia, as well as in the world as a whole, is the Karakoram mountain range. It is located southeast of the Pamirs and Hindu Kush, between the Kun-Lun and the Himalayas. Its average altitude is 6000 km. More than 80 mountains above 7000 meters. There are also eight-thousanders: Mount Chogori (8611 m), Hidden Peak (8068 m), Gasherbrum (8073 m) and Broad Peak (8047 m).

One of the longest mountain systems in Asia is the Kunlun Mountains - they stretch from the Pamirs in the west to the Sino-Tibetan Mountains in the east, bypassing the Tibetan Plateau from the north (from the south the Tibetan Plateau bypasses the Himalayas). The length of Kunlun is about 2500 km, the width in some places reaches 600 km. The highest mountain in Kunlun is Aksai Chin (7167 m).

The Pamirs are also a large mountain system. It is located in the south of Central Asia on the territory of modern China, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The highest mountain in the Pamirs is Kongur Peak. Its height is 7719 m.

The Hindu Kush Mountains are also located in the south of Central Asia. Their length is 1000 km, and their width is from 50 to 500 km. They mark the boundary between the Indus River basin (South Asia) and the endorheic basin of Central Asia. The highest mountain in the Hindu Kush is Tirichmir (7690 m).

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