Are the most unique mountain system. It divides Eurasia into two continents – Asia and Europe. Also, the mountain range crosses the Russian Federation from north to south. The Urals are a real treasure for tourism. It absorbs Asian enthusiasm, unique flavor and European severity.
Ural Mountains: description, photo, video
By the standards of such “giants”, like , the Ural mountain system is modest in size. Its height does not exceed 1900 meters. In addition, the ridges are quite narrow. Such features of the Urals contribute to tourism. The mountains, along almost their entire length, are accessible to humans. The landscape of the mountain range is unique. Rivers flowing into large bodies of water and powerful mountain streams with crystal clear waters take their sources here. The Kama, Ural, Pechora, White River and so on.
The Ural Mountains have been known in Russia for a very long time. The first mentions of them date back to ancient times. Then they were called the Hypoborean Mountains. According to surviving sources dating back to the 9th century, they were referred to as the "Earth Belt". In "The Tale of Bygone Years" local residents The Urals were called the Big Stone. The same name was applied to the first map of these places. The toponym Ural is associated with the word “Ur” in the Mansi language, which means “mountain”. According to another theory, this word was borrowed from the Bashkir language.
The Ural Mountains boast a wide variety of landscapes. There are not only peaks here, but also various caves and gorges. The Urals are also rich in fauna. Representatives of the local fauna live mainly in coniferous and mixed forests.
Panorama of the Ural Mountains
So, squirrels live among the thickets of spruce trees. The marten is widespread in local forests and also preys on the mentioned squirrel. The main wealth of the Ural Mountains can be called commercial fur-bearing animals. The sable lives in the vicinity of the Northern Urals. Due to the uncontrolled shooting of these valuable animals, hunting them was prohibited by law.
Where are the Ural Mountains located?
Finding the Ural Mountains on the map is not difficult. They are located on the territory of the Russian Federation and have a length of about 2.5 thousand kilometers. They begin off the coast of the Arctic Ocean, and end not far from the hot weather. The Urals crosses 5 natural zones.
The Ural Mountains pass through 7 territorial units:
- Tyumen, Sverdlovsk and Orenburg regions;
- Perm region,
- the Republics of Komi and Bashkortostan;
- Kostanai and Aktobe regions in Kazakhstan.
Ural Mountains on the map
Coordinates of the Ural Mountains on the map:
- Latitude — 60°28′70″
- Longitude — 60°44′76″
The main city of the Urals is Yekaterinburg. Other major cities include:
- Permian;
- Nizhny Tagil;
- Chelyabinsk;
- Magnitogorsk, etc.
How to get to the Ural Mountains
All large cities of the Urals have good accessibility and a developed transport network. This fact makes this mountain system one of the main tourist sites for domestic tourists. By plane, most cities can be reached from the capital in 3-4 hours. By railway the journey will take from 1 to 2 days.
The low altitude of the Urals made it possible to build transport routes through it. In particular, the famous railway route, the Trans-Siberian, runs here.
Ural Mountains - how to get to the highest peak (Mount Narodnaya):
- the first travel point is Verkhnyaya Inta station in the Komi Republic;
- the office of the Yugyd Va National Park is located on Dzerzhinsky Street 27a;
- all participants in the hike must obtain appropriate permission; the application must be submitted 10 days before the planned date;
- Then from the bus station you should get to the city of Inta, from where you will be taken to the foot of the mountain.
When is the best time to visit the Ural Mountains?
The Ural Mountains are open to travelers all year round. Each season here has its own characteristics. Some areas are best visited in summer, others are more attractive in winter. As for the climate, the large extent of the mountains played a role. The main part of the Urals is located in the temperate climate zone.
In the north in summer the temperature varies within 12 degrees, and in the south – 22 degrees. In winter there is no such difference in temperature. In January, on the southern slopes the thermometer drops to -18 degrees, and on the northern slopes - to 20. Big influence The local climate is influenced by the mountain topography. The closer to the peaks, the more severe the weather conditions. At the same time, on different slopes located nearby, the temperature can differ radically, just like on. The Urals are also characterized by uneven distribution of precipitation.
Peculiarities
On the territory of the Ural Mountains there are a large number of ski resorts. They are concentrated in the Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk regions, as well as in the Republic of Bashkortostan. The most large resorts– Bannoye, Abzakovo and Zavyalikha. The first two are located near Magnitogorsk, and the last is located near the city of Trekhgorny. Abzakovo has been repeatedly recognized as one of the best Ural resorts.
The Ural Mountains are suitable for both experienced skiers and beginners. There are trails of varying difficulty levels here. Winter holiday season starts in October and ends in early April. In addition to skiing, snowmobiling is available. You can take a break from skiing on mountain rivers. Rafting tours are regularly carried out in Magnitogorsk, Ashu, Kropchaevo and Miass.
For lovers of more relaxing holiday The doors of the Ural sanatoriums are always open. In terms of service and infrastructure, they are in no way inferior to European ones. The local nature boasts clean air, healing mineral waters and mud. Many resorts offer all-inclusive services. All kinds of excursions with an interesting and exciting program are organized to the Ural Mountains.
What to see in the area
The most famous protected area in the Urals is the Oleniy Ruchi Park. It is located on the territory of the Sverdlovsk region. Tourists who are interested in history can visit the Pisanitsa rock. On its walls you can see drawings left by the creators of the ancient era. Of great interest are the Big Pass and local caves, like. There's enough in the park developed infrastructure, built observation decks and hiking trails. There are places for comfortable rest and rope crossings.
Those who have read “The Malachite Box” written by Pavel Bazhov should definitely visit the Bazhov Places park. There are excellent opportunities for peace and quality rest here. You can walk around the park, and there are bicycle trails. Traveling along well-developed routes, you can see the Talkov Stone lake, the Markov Stone rock and other landscapes. If you wish, you can also drive to, which offers a beautiful view.
You can admire semi-precious stones in the Rezhevskaya nature reserve. You can travel around the mines only if accompanied by a representative of the reserve administration. In addition to the deposits, you can admire the Rezh River. On its coast is the Shaitan Stone. It is believed that natural energy is concentrated in it. Every year thousands of tourists come to him with their desires.
- This is one of the main riches of Russia. It is impossible to list the number of attractions that are found here. Each of them deserves a separate article.
The Ural Mountains are a mountain range on the border of Europe and Asia, stretching from north to south. In geography, it is customary to divide these mountains according to the nature of the relief, natural conditions and other features into Pai-Khoi, Polar Urals, Subpolar, Northern, Middle, Southern Urals and Mugodzhary. It is necessary to distinguish between the concepts of the Ural Mountains and the Urals: in a broader sense, the territory of the Urals includes the areas adjacent to the mountain system - the Urals, Cis-Urals and Trans-Urals.
The relief of the Ural Mountains consists of a main watershed ridge and several side ridges separated by wide depressions. In the Far North there are glaciers and snowfields, in the middle part there are mountains with smoothed peaks, the Ural Mountains are old, they are about 300 million years old, they are noticeably eroded. highest peak- Mount Narodnaya - approximately two kilometers high.
The watershed of large rivers runs along the mountain ridge: the rivers of the Urals belong mainly to the basin of the Caspian Sea (Kama with Chusovaya and Belaya, Ural). Pechora, Tobol and others belong to the system of one of the largest rivers in Siberia - the Ob. There are many lakes on the eastern slope of the Urals.
The landscapes of the Ural Mountains are predominantly forest; there is a noticeable difference in the nature of vegetation on different sides of the mountains: on the western slope there are mainly dark coniferous, spruce-fir forests (on Southern Urals- in places mixed and broad-leaved), on the eastern slope - light-coniferous pine-larch forests. In the south there is forest-steppe and steppe (mostly plowed).
The Ural Mountains have long been of interest to geographers, including from the point of view of their unique location. In the era of Ancient Rome, these mountains seemed so distant to scientists that they were seriously called Riphean, or Riphean: literally translated from Latin - “coastal”, and in the expanded sense - “mountains at the edge of the earth”. They received the name Hyperborean (from the Greek “extreme northern”) on behalf of the mythical country of Hyperborea; it was used for a thousand years, until in 1459 the world map of Fra Mauro appeared, on which the “end of the world” was shifted beyond the Urals.
It is believed that the mountains were discovered by the Novgorodians in 1096, during one of the campaigns to Pechora and Ugra by a squad of Novgorod ushkuiniks, who were engaged in fur fishing, trade and collection of yasak. The mountains did not receive any name then. At the beginning of the 15th century. Russian settlements appear on the upper Kama - Anfalovsky town and Sol-Kamskaya.
The first known name of these mountains is contained in documents from the turn of the 15th-16th centuries, where they are called Stone: so in Ancient Rus' called any large rock or cliff. On the “Big Drawing” - the first map of the Russian state, compiled in the second half of the 16th century. - The Urals are designated as Big Stone. In the XVI-XVIII centuries. The name Belt appears, reflecting the geographical position of the mountains between two plains. There are such variant names as Big Stone, Big Belt, Stone Belt, Stone of the Big Belt.
The name “Ural” was originally used only for the territory of the Southern Urals and was taken from the Bashkir language, in which it meant “height” or “elevation.” By the middle of the 18th century. the name “Ural Mountains” is already applied to the entire mountain system.
The Ural Mountains are a ridge on the border of Europe and Asia, as well as a natural border within Russia, to the east of which are Siberia and the Far East, and to the west is the European part of the country.
This figurative expression is resorted to whenever it is necessary to give a short and colorful description of the natural resources of the Ural Mountains.
The antiquity of the Ural Mountains created unique conditions for the development of mineral resources: as a result of long-term destruction by erosion, the deposits literally came to the surface. The combination of energy sources and raw materials predetermined the development of the Urals as a mining region.
Since ancient times, the mining of iron, copper, chrome and nickel ores, potassium salts, asbestos, coal, precious and semi-precious stones - Ural gems - has been carried out here. From the middle of the 20th century. Oil and gas fields are being developed.
Russia has long developed the lands adjacent to the Ural Mountains, occupying Komi-Permyak towns, annexing Udmurt and Bashkir territories: in the middle of the 16th century. After the defeat of the Kazan Khanate, most of Bashkiria and the Kama part of Udmurtia voluntarily became part of Russia. A special role in consolidating Russia in the Urals was played by the Ural Cossacks, who received the highest permission to engage in free arable farming here. The Stroganov merchants laid the foundation for the purposeful development of the riches of the Ural Mountains, having received from Tsar Ivan IV a charter for the Ural lands “and what lies in them.”
At the beginning of the 18th century. Large-scale factory construction began in the Urals, driven by the needs of both the economic development of the country and the needs of the military departments. Under Peter I, copper smelters and iron foundries were built here, and subsequently large industrial centers were formed around them: Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Perm, Nizhny Tagil, Zlatoust. Gradually, the Ural Mountains found themselves in the center of the largest mining region in Russia, along with Moscow and St. Petersburg.
During the era of the USSR, the Urals became one of the industrial centers of the country, the most famous enterprises are the Ural Heavy Engineering Plant (Uralmash), the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant (ChTZ), the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Plant (Magnitka), During the Great Patriotic War Industrial production was exported to the Urals from the German-occupied territories of the USSR.
In recent decades, the industrial importance of the Ural Mountains has noticeably decreased: many deposits are almost exhausted, and the level of environmental pollution is quite high.
The bulk of the local population lives in the Ural economic region and in the Republic of Bashkortostan. In more northern regions, belonging to the North-Western and West Siberian economic regions, the population is extremely rare.
During the industrial development of the Ural Mountains, as well as the plowing of the surrounding lands, hunting and deforestation, the habitats of many animals were destroyed, and many species of animals and birds disappeared, among them the wild horse, saiga, bustard, little bustard. Herds of deer that previously grazed throughout the Urals have now migrated deeper into the tundra. However, thanks to the measures taken to protect and reproduce the fauna of the Urals, it was possible to preserve brown bear, wolf, wolverine, fox, sable, ermine, and lynx in the reserves. Where it has not yet been possible to restore populations of local species, acclimatization of introduced individuals is being successfully carried out: for example, in the Ilmensky Nature Reserve - sika deer, beaver, deer, raccoon dog, American mink.
general information
Location: between the East European and West Siberian plains.Geographical division: Pai-Khoi ridge, Polar Urals (from Konstantinov Kamen to the headwaters of the Khulga River), Subpolar Urals (the section between the Khulga and Shchugor rivers), Northern Urals(Howl) (from the Shchugor River to Kosvinsky Kamen and Oslyanka Mountain), Middle Ural (Shor) (from Oslyanka Mountain to the Ufa River) and Southern Ural (southern part of the mountains below the city of Orsk), Mugodzhary (Kazakhstan).
Economic regions: Ural, Volga, North-Western, West Siberian.
Administrative affiliation: Russian Federation(Perm, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Kurgan, Orenburg, Arkhangelsk and Tyumen regions, Udmurt Republic, Bashkortostan Republic, Komi Republic), Kazakhstan (Aktobe region).
Large cities: - 1,428,262 people. (2015), - 1,182,221 people. (2015), Ufa - 1,096,702 people. (2014), - 1,036,476 people. (2015), Izhevsk - 642,024 people. (2015), Orenburg - 561,279 people. (2015), Magnitogorsk - 417,057 people. (2015), Nizhny Tagil - 356,744 people. (2015), Kurgan - 326,405 people. (2015).
Languages: Russian, Bashkir, Udmurt, Komi-Permyak, Kazakh.
Ethnic composition: Russians, Bashkirs, Udmurts, Komi, Kazakhs.
Religions: Orthodoxy, Islam, traditional beliefs.
Currency unit: ruble, tenge.
Rivers: the Caspian Sea basin (Kama with Chusovaya and Belaya, Ural), the Arctic Ocean basin (Pechora with Usa; Tobol, Iset, Tura belong to the Ob system).
Lakes: Tavatui, Argazi, Uvildy, Turgoyak, Bolshoye Shchuchye.
Numbers
Length: more than 2600 km from north to south (with Pai-Khoi and Mugodzhary).Width: from 40 to 150 km.
Geological age: from 250 to 350 million years.
Highest point: Mount Narodnaya (1895 m).
Other peaks: Karpinsky (1878 m), Yamantau (1638 m), Manaraga (1662 m), Telposis (1617 m), Konzhakovsky Kamen (1569 m), Payer (1499 m), Oslyanka (1119 m), Sredny Baseg (994 m).
Climate and weather
Continental.Average January temperature: from -20°С (Polar Urals) to -15°С (Southern Urals).
Average temperature in July: from +9°С (Polar Urals) to +20°С (Southern Urals).
Average annual precipitation: Subpolar and Northern Urals - 1000 mm, Southern Urals - 650-750 mm.
Relative humidity: 60-70%.
Economy
Minerals: iron, copper, chromium, nickel, potassium salts, asbestos, coal, oil.Industry: mining, ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, heavy engineering, chemical and petrochemical, fertilizers, electrical.
Hydroelectric power: Pavlovskaya, Yumaguzinskaya, Shirokovskaya, Iriklinskaya hydroelectric power stations.
Forestry.
Agriculture: crop farming (wheat, rye, garden crops), livestock farming (cattle, pig farming).
Traditional crafts: artistic processing of Ural gems, knitting of Orenburg down scarves.
Service sector: tourism, transport, trade.
Attractions
■ Natural: Pechora-Ilychsky, "Basegi", "Shulgan-Tash", steppe, Bashkir reserves, mineralogical reserve, Divya, Arakaevskaya, Sugomakskaya, Kungurskaya Ice and Kapova caves, rocky outcrops of the Seven Brothers, Devil's Settlement and Stone Tents, Bashkir national park, Yugyd Va National Park (Komi Republic), Hoffman Glacier (Saber Ridge), Azov Mountain, Alikaev Kamen, Olenyi Ruchii Natural Park, Blue Mountains Pass, Revun Rapids (Iset River), Zhigalanskie Waterfalls (Zhigalan River), Alexander Hill, Taganay National Park, Ustinov Canyon, Gumerovskoe Gorge, Krasny Klyuch spring, Sterlitamak Shihans, Krasnaya Krucha.Curious facts
■ The peoples of the Urals still use the names of the Urals in their languages: Mansi - Nyor, Khanty - Kev, Komi - Iz, Nenets - Pe or Igarka Pe. In all languages it means the same thing - “stone”. Among Russians who have long lived in the north of the Urals, a tradition has been preserved to also call these mountains Kamen.■ The bowls of the St. Petersburg Hermitage are made from Ural malachite and jasper, as well as the interior decoration and altar of the St. Petersburg Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood.
■ Scientists have not yet found an explanation for the mysterious natural phenomenon: the Uvildy, Bolshoi Kisegach and Turgoyak lakes have unusually clear water. In neighboring lakes it is completely muddy.
■ The top of Mount Kachkanar is a collection of oddly shaped scapes, many of which have their own names. The most famous of them is Camel Rock.
■ In the past, the richest deposits of high-quality iron ore of the Magnitnaya, Vysoka and Blagodat mountains, known throughout the world and included in all geology textbooks, are now either demolished or turned into quarries hundreds of meters deep.
■ The ethnographic appearance of the Urals was created by three streams of migrants: Russian Old Believers who fled here in the 17th-18th centuries, peasants from the European part of Russia transferred to the Ural factories (mainly from the modern Tula and Ryazan regions) and Ukrainians brought in as additional labor at the beginning XIX century
■ In 1996, the Yugyd Va National Park, together with the Pechora-Ilychsky Nature Reserve, with which the park borders in the south, was included in the list of UNESCO World Natural Heritage sites under the name “Virgin Komi Forests”.
■ Alikaev Stone - a 50-meter rock on the Ufa River. The second name of the rock is Maryin Rock. The TV movie “Shadows Disappear at Noon” - about life in the Ural outback - was filmed here. It was from the Alikaev stone, according to the plot of the film, that the Menshikov brothers threw off the collective farm chairman Marya Krasnaya. Since then, the stone has a second name - Maryin Rock.
■ Zhigalan waterfalls on the Zhigalan River, on the eastern slope of the Kvarkush ridge, form a cascade 550 m long. With a river length of about 8 km, the height difference from source to mouth is almost 630 m.
■ Sugomak Cave is the only cave in the Ural Mountains, 123 m long, formed in marble rock. There are only a few such caves in Russia.
■ The Red Key spring is the most powerful water source in Russia and the second largest in the world after the Fontaine de Vaucluse spring in France. The water flow of the Krasny Klyuch spring is 14.88 m3/sec. A landmark of Bashkiria with the status of a hydrological natural monument of federal significance.
The formation of the relief of any part of the Earth occurred, first of all, under the influence of the internal forces of the Earth - tectonic stresses. They are capable of uniting or dividing continents, creating mountains in place of plains, and lowering a mountainous country below ocean level. These processes follow a “geological clock” - tens and hundreds of millions of years. Other forces of the Earth begin to act on the relief created by tectonics: gravity, solar radiation, wind, water, ice. Over thousands and millions of years, they are capable of, if not destroying, then thoroughly reducing the height of mountains, filling depressions with material from destroyed rocks, and creating ridges of hills, gorges and ravines. Living organisms - bacteria and plants - contribute to the processes of rock weathering and the creation of individual small relief forms.
The formation of the modern relief of the Southern Urals began in the Mesozoic era, about 160 million years ago. The collapsing Ural Mountains filled the depressions at their feet with their material. The sea splashed along the eastern spurs of the Southern Urals 70-37 million years ago. West Bank of this sea passed approximately along the Kunashak-Chelyabinsk-Troitsk line. Coastline was winding and replete with bays. The sea was warm, shallow, with a flat bottom, gently sloping to the east.
In Quaternary times, renewed tectonic movements caused the growth of the Ural Mountains, smoothed by weathering. Over the past 700 thousand years, they have risen by 200-400 m. On the western slope of the Urals, the growth of mountains caused deep incision of rivers into previously developed bottoms, and on the eastern slope it “turned around” the beds of small and medium-sized rivers, previously flowing in meridional valleys, on latitudinal direction
(Uy, Miass, Uvelka, etc.).
Over the past hundreds of thousands of years, the Southern Urals has remained a tectonically stable region. But the slow rise (up to 8 mm/year) continues. In today's topography of the Southern Urals, from west to east, the following are distinguished: 1) the Ufa Plateau; 2) the Ural Mountains themselves (Ural Ridge); 3) Trans-Ural peneplain (flat, in some places slightly hilly plain). To the east, the Trans-Ural Plain passes into the wide West Siberian Lowland - a flat country with numerous swamps and lake depressions.
As already mentioned, the Ural Mountains are very ancient and heavily destroyed. Essentially, this is only the preserved foundation of former mountains. Everything that was once hidden at great depths is now almost on the surface. The mineral resources of the Southern Urals are distinguished by their richness and diversity of species. Huge deposits of most metals, valuable deposits of precious stones and innumerable reserves of all kinds of mineral raw materials are known here, a simple listing of which would take up a lot of space.
It is also interesting that many scientists are inclined to believe that in ancient times the Urals were higher than the Himalayas (modern and most high mountains on the ground)!
How the Ural Mountains were born
The Urals on Earth is a unique phenomenon.
And in its role as a planetary suture that once held two great continents together.
And because of the abundance of natural landscapes here, scattered generously throughout its entire space.
And in terms of climatic diversity.
In fact, where else will you find such a region, where the head would be cooled by the centuries-old ice of the Northern Ocean, and the foot would be scorched by the calcined sands of the deserts? A land where, on the same June day, the never-setting sun shines over the blooming polar tundra and the herbs of alpine meadows luxuriously spread out. Where you can hunt to your heart's content in the cedar trees or, after admiring the harmonious choirs of elegant birch tufts, stop at a Bashkir nomad camp, drink plenty of chilled kumiss, while watching how everything around vibrates in the sultry steppe haze...
And now from these poetic pictures of the Ural region we will have to move on to more prosaic, but very necessary for our story, things. It is not without interest, I think, to understand for ourselves how such an unusual natural creation appeared on the body of the planet, what forces erected it. Therefore, a short excursion into the science that studies the Earth is inevitable - into geology.
What does modern science define by the concept of “Ural”?
Strictly speaking, the Urals are a mountainous country with areas of two great plains adjacent to it from the west and east. Why geologists think so will be discussed later. As mentioned earlier, the Ural mountainous country lies on the planet in a rather narrow strip, the width of which rarely exceeds one hundred and fifty kilometers, and it stretches from the Aral deserts to the Arctic Ocean for more than two and a half thousand kilometers. In this way, it is similar to many mountain ranges known on Earth - the Andes, for example. Only the mountains in the Urals, although often rocky, are much lower, less steep, more ordinary, or something, than their famous counterparts somewhere in the Alps or Himalayas.
But if the Ural Mountains outwardly do not amaze with anything, then the content of their subsoil is completely unique.
The Urals are world famous for the richness and diversity of its geological structure. This is an irrefutable truth. But we must understand the significance of this fact to the subtlest shade - the Urals are perhaps the only place on Earth where specialists have found rocks formed in almost all periods of the planet’s existence. And minerals, the appearance of which could be due to the existence here (of course, in different time) all conceivable physical and chemical regimes both in the interior of the Earth and on its surface. Some kind of utter mishmash of geological creations of different ages and different characteristics!
But that's not all.
The abundant list of geological formations of the Urals naturally includes a uniquely wide range of the richest deposits of almost all minerals known on our planet. Oil and diamonds. Iron and jasper with marble. Gas and malachite. Bauxite and corundum. And... and... and... The list is endless - not everything has been discovered yet, and we still don’t know all types of minerals.
All this - the diversity that amazes even experienced professionals, the abundance of subsoil treasures, and their unprecedented diversity of ages - all this has made the Urals a geological Mecca for the world community. This began from the time of Peter the Great - and has not ended to this day. “Everyone flashed before us, everyone was here...” Historians claim that the Russian Geological Committee, created by royal command more than a hundred years ago, was established mainly so that scientists could finally decide on this natural disaster, called the Urals...
Only... just a huge number of studies did not simplify the solution of the problem for which academic luminaries came to the Urals. Problems of understanding - how does it all come together here?!
Listing all the created hypotheses for the formation of the Urals is not a task for a short essay. An extensive monograph is needed here. After all, the contradictory nature of observations verified and rechecked a thousand times has created an incredible kaleidoscope of facts. The researchers had to logically reconcile the obvious reality of finding literally the most heterogeneous sediments nearby. And the siliceous slabby fragments of the formations of the ocean floor, which raged here three hundred to four hundred million years ago, are now crushing underfoot. And boulder ridges, brought deep into the ancient continent by glacial massifs hundreds of thousands of years ago. And outcrops of rocks of the granite or gabbro series, now being destroyed by the winds and the sun, but which could only have formed at many kilometers of the earth’s depths, in the dark crucible of thousand-degree temperatures and many-thousands of atmospheric pressures that reign there. And the sandy spits of river sediments that washed here more than one million tons of sand and pebbles from the collapsing mountains...
So to this day, all this allows dozens of very different assumptions to exist simultaneously on equal terms about how the Earth lived within the Urals throughout its billion-year history. To this day, deciphering its true history is a pressing and complex problem for geologists.
True, today scientists have at least decided on the criterion by which they share the hypotheses of the formation of the Ural mountainous country.
This criterion is cosmogonic.
He finally made it possible to group all points of view according to their relation to the original substance of planet Earth.
Supporters of one approach agree that all celestial bodies visible from Earth - including planets - were formed as a result of the convergence and compaction of previously scattered cosmic proto-matter. It was either the same as the meteorites currently falling on our planet, or it was a scrap of fiery liquid melt. The creators of hypotheses based on this premise include the philosopher Kant, the famous mathematician and astronomer Laplace, and the outstanding Soviet researcher Otto Yulievich Schmidt. By the way, in Soviet schools Hypotheses from this series were mainly studied. And they are not so easy to dispute - meteorites continue to regularly pierce the Earth to this day, increasing its mass. And that to this day the earth’s core is liquid, probably not a single geologist doubts. And the law of universal gravitation still regularly determines the course of the stars and planets.
Proponents of another approach argue that all planets (the Earth, of course, is no exception for them) are fragments of proto-matter, formed as a result of its explosive expansion, that is, in their opinion, there is a process of decompression of the matter of the Universe. The great Lomonosov did not deny such a view; many leading geologists and cosmologists of the world and our country now adhere to it...
And their conviction is understandable. Astronomers have found that when going towards Earth, the light from all visible stars shifts to the red part of the spectrum. And there is only one satisfactory explanation for this - all the stars fly away from a certain center. This is a consequence of the decompression of space matter.
According to the latest estimates, our planet has existed as a separate celestial body for about four and a half billion years. So: in the Urals, rocks have been found whose age is determined to be no less than three billion years old. And the whole “tragedy” for supporters of the hypotheses is that this established fact is easily explained from the positions of both points of view...
How did the Urals live from the birth of the planet to the present day? Naturally, here, too, two different pictures are offered. Supporters of the “shrinking” Earth believe that all this time the Urals behaved like an oscillating string (of course, slowly oscillating and, of course, a huge string) - it either rose to the heavens, bristling with rocky mountain peaks, or descended, bending towards the earth’s center, and then - throughout the entire depression - it was flooded by oceanic swells. Naturally, these fluctuations were not so simple, consistent and unidirectional. During them, there were chips and ruptures of the earth's firmament, and the crushing of individual sections of it in the corrugation of folds, and the formation of cracks of different depths. Water rushed from below and above into the gaping gaps of the cracks, streams of red-hot lava burst out of the bowels of the earth, and clouds of volcanic ash covered the sky and the sun, spewing out of the vents of fire-breathing volcanoes. There are many deposits of this type in the Urals.
Globe of Martin Behaim (1492)
During the uplift of sections of the Urals, debris, pebbles, and sand usually form on them. During subsidence, rivers carried destroyed material into the oceans and seas, filling their coastal zones with clay, silt, and sand. Dying microorganisms created kilometer-long layers of limestone and other typically oceanic geological formations in the seas...
And all these breeds are in abundance in the Urals, which, according to supporters of the first approach, is quite enough to recognize it as true.
Proponents of a “disconnecting” Universe believe that the Earth expanded in leaps and bounds. The picture he paints of the formation of the Urals is as follows. With the next significant expansion of the body of our planet, it shuddered, cracked, and huge continental blocks, broken by the expanding substance of the earth’s interior that was bursting them apart, slowly, as if in an ice drift, crawled across the face of the planet. (By the way, it has been established that all continents are still doing this, each moving in its own direction at a speed of up to several centimeters per year.) The space between the continents began to quickly fill with puffing gases and molten matter from the deep interior. From there, huge masses of salty waters of the future oceans and seas, formed during the same process of decompression, splashed out onto the earth's surface. This was the case in modern oceans.
This is how the Urals were formed. The fragments of the ancient continents, moving away from each other along the roundness of our planet, on the other hand, inevitably had to come closer to some other fragment, also from a previously intact piece of land. This is how Europe, which had broken away from something, and Asia, which had broken off from somewhere, began to come closer together. When colliding, the edges of the approaching fragments began to crumble, crumple, and prick. Some pieces of the converging continents were squeezed out onto the surface of the Earth, some were crushed inward, crushed into folds. Because of the gigantic pressures, something melted, something stratified, something completely changed its original appearance. A monstrous jumble of the most heterogeneous formations was formed, which humorous geologists dubbed a “broken plate.” The squeezed out blocks of rocks formed chains of Ural ridges along the line of contact of materials.
What was described, according to the authors of this idea, happened quite a long time ago, hundreds of millions of years ago. But one should not think that this was the last act of expansion of our planet. Geologists believe: faults earth's crust within the Urals have occurred more than once since then. They consider one of the last events of this kind to be the formation of a split in the Southern Urals, stretching in a line from Bredy through Troitsk to Kopeisk. Here, according to enthusiasts of the idea, is the birth of such a crevice in the earth's firmament, which can, in a couple of hundred million years, grow to the size of the Atlantic Ocean. She's just at the very beginning of this glorious path. The next stage they see is the formation of a giant depression like Baikal - in about a hundred thousand years, then the spreading shores of the nascent sea (like the Red Sea) - in another two or three hundred thousand years, and then a direct path to the new Great Ocean. It would be interesting to see...
The places where continents collide are also riddled with numerous cracks and become easily permeable to ore-bearing solutions.
From the perspective of these approaches, the abundance and wealth of mineral resources in the Urals can be easily explained...
No matter how they appeared on the body of the planet, the Ural Mountains for the last few tens of millions of years have invariably risen on the border of two continents, open in winter and summer to all winds, rains, snows, baked by the sun, frozen by frosty winters. All natural elements contributed to the destruction of the once majestic ridges. The tops of the mountains gradually collapsed, crumbled into countless fragments of small and large blocks, and became lower and rounder. So they gradually turned into what we see today - into a community of several closely spaced, not too high and not too rocky chains of mountain ranges, stretched for the most part almost strictly from south to north (or vice versa). It should be noted that in the south and north of the Ural mountainous country, its mountains are both higher and more rocky. In its central part they are significantly lowered, in some places they are just high, dignified hills.
And one more feature in the structure of the Ural Mountains can be noticed by a traveler crossing them from west to east. The mountainous country is asymmetrical in the latitudinal direction. It transitions into the Russian Plain as if smoothly, through a series of gradually descending western foothills. Its transition to the West Siberian Lowland is more abrupt. In a significant part of the Urals it looks like this: mountains, mountains, mountains, a cliff - and immediately a low, swampy Trans-Urals region.
The modern climatic zones of the Urals were formed relatively recently, in the last couple of hundred thousand years, almost immediately before the settlement of the Urals by humans. At that time, the most distinct traces of cooling appeared on the planet. They have been fairly fully traced throughout the entire length of the Ural Mountains, and have also manifested themselves in changes in vegetation and the species composition of the animal world. The cooling of the planet led to its glaciation. But an interesting detail: if in the European part of our country the tongues of glaciers penetrated to the latitude of modern Dnepropetrovsk, then in the Urals, even at the time of the deepest glaciation, they did not penetrate south of the upper reaches of the Pechora.
Judging by fossil vegetation, before the last ice age the climate in the Urals was quite favorable. Here - almost along the entire length - then hop hornbeams (a tree of the Mediterranean climate, found in the Pechora River basin), oaks, lindens, hornbeams, and hazel grew. Shrubs were abundant, and a variety of grass spores and pollen were found. But during the glaciation period, not a trace remained of the free forest-steppe open forest with vast open spaces. It was replaced by taiga coniferous forests, and the luxurious herbs in large areas were replaced by quinoa and wormwood.
In pre-glacial times, the level of the World Ocean was one hundred fifty to two hundred meters lower than today. On the shelves of the modern northern seas, many kilometers of once-deep valleys, then dug into the earth's surface by Pechora and Ob, have been discovered. And Kama’s bed lay one hundred and fifty meters below its current level. The peaks of the Ural Mountains were on average 200–500 meters higher than the modern level. And since the mountains were higher, the rivers originating in them flowed faster. In general, powerful streams flowed from the Urals at that time. Evidence of their power is now the scattering of boulders that they carried from the mountains far to the plain. Such boulders - up to one and a half meters in diameter - can often be found while walking in the vicinity of Khanty-Mansiysk.
And the Ural rivers were much more water-rich.
Today the small river Khmelevka flows near the Cherry Mountains. Such a homely, meek Cinderella. And it has been established for sure that it was once a very, very large river; it flowed along the western slopes of the Potanin and Vishnevy mountains, absorbing the valley of the present Gorkaya River, and flowed into the present lakes Bolshoy and Maly Kochan and Ara-Kul. Then these lakes were one huge whole - the sea, and now only in the deepest places of the ancient basin mirrors of its waters have been preserved.
Apparently, it is not without reason that the time of melting glaciers from the era of the largest glaciation in the Urals received the name “time of great waters” from experts.
In general, periods of glaciation seriously affected the formation of the modern appearance of the Urals. And not only the Urals. Let me introduce you to one hydrographic incident that happened at that time.
We have already mentioned above that the ice sheets on the Russian Plain reached the bend of the Dnieper near modern Dnepropetrovsk and the latitude of the city of Ivdel in the Urals. The glaciers completely blocked and reshaped the hitherto familiar structure of river flows. Thus, the rivers of the Pechora basin began to flow into the Kama - through Vyatka. The glacier is an insurmountable wall under the pond and ancient waters big river, which once flowed in the area between the current cities of Yuryevets and Vasilsursk. It flowed north and flowed into the ancient Unzha, which then belonged to the Don basin. The dammed waters, constantly replenished by the melting glacier, overflowed the bowl of the emerging reservoir and, pouring through the heights of the watershed near present-day Kazan, poured into the streams of the Kama. Gradually they completely sawed through this watershed and formed a completely worthy river bed. This is how the great Volga River appeared.
Considering the further process of formation of the Volga basin, geologist G. F. Mirchink came to the conclusion that it “... is, in essence, the story of the strengthening of the power of the Kama. The tributaries of the Kama, gradually increasing in power and number, created the modern Volga. Historically, in the geological sense of the word, it would be more correct to consider the Volga a tributary of the Kama..."
Isn’t it deeply symbolic that the streams of the Ural river Kama modestly and inconspicuously turned into the great Russian river Volga?
Is it not from such a hydrogeological fact that the tradition began, according to which all the abundant power of the Urals unobtrusively, quietly, but significantly began to be personified by the power of Russia...
Since the time of the first great glaciation of the Urals, all its main climatic landscape zones appeared and have been preserved to this day - tundra (alpine), mountain-taiga, taiga-plain, forest-steppe and steppe.
This is how everything developed in the Urals by the time man appeared here.
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From the book Introduction to Historical Uralistics author Napolskikh Vladimir VladimirovichPart I. Ural peoples: basic information on ethnicity
The Ural Mountains are a mountain system located between the West Siberian and East European plains, and represent a kind of border separating Europe from Asia. They were formed by the collision of the African and Eurasian lithospheric plates, as a result of which one of them literally crushed the other. From the point of view of geologists, these mountains arose in a complex way, as they consist of rocks of different ages and types.
With a length of more than 2000 km, the Ural Mountains form the Southern, Northern, Subpolar, Polar and Middle Urals. Because of their length, they were called the Earth Belt in the first mentions of the 11th century. Everywhere you can see crystal clear mountain streams and rivers, which then flow into larger bodies of water. The following large rivers flow there: Kama, Ural, Belaya, Chusovaya and Pechora.
The height of the Ural Mountains does not exceed 1895 meters. Thus, it is medium in level (600-800 m) and the narrowest in width of the ridge. This part is characterized by peaked and sharp shapes with steep slopes and deep valleys. The peak of Pai-Er has the greatest rise (1500 m).
The subpolar zone expands slightly and is considered the highest part of the ridge. The following peaks are located here: Mount Narodnaya (1894 m), which is the highest, Karpinsky (1795 m), Sablya (1425 m) and many other Ural mountains, the average rise of which ranges from 1300 to 1400 meters.
They are also characterized by sharp landforms and large valleys. This part is also notable for the fact that there are several glaciers here, the largest of which stretches almost 1 km in length.
In the northern part, the Ural Mountains, whose height does not exceed 600 meters, are characterized by smoothed and rounded shapes. Some of them, made of crystalline rocks, take on funny shapes under the influence of rain and wind. Closer to the south they become even lower, and in the middle part they take the form of a gentle arc, where the most significant mark (886 m) is occupied by the Kachkanar peak. The relief here is smoothed and more flat.
In the southern zone, the Ural Mountains rise noticeably, forming many parallel ridges. From highest points one can note (1638 m) Yamantau and (1586 m) Iremel, the rest are slightly lower (Big Sholom, Nurgush, etc.).
In the Urals, in addition to beautiful mountains and caves there is a very picturesque, diverse nature, as well as many other attractions. And that is why it is so attractive to many tourists. Here you can choose routes for people of different levels of training - both for beginners and for lovers of extreme travel. In addition to all other advantages, the Ural Mountains are a storehouse of minerals, which include the following: ores of copper, chromium, nickel, titanium; placers of gold, platinum, silver; deposits of coal, gas, oil; precious malachite, diamonds, yam, crystal, amethyst, etc.).
As they say, the only things better than mountains are mountains. And this is true, because their indescribable atmosphere, beauty, harmony, grandeur and clean air inspire and charge with positive, energy and vivid impressions for a long time.
