What mountains are in Siberia. Characteristics of the mountains of southern Siberia. Relief of the mountains of Southern Siberia

The mountain system of Southern Siberia includes:

Altai Mountains
- Salair
- Kuznetsk Alatau

Mountains of Tuva
- Mountains of the Baikal region
- Mountains of Transbaikalia
- Aldan Highlands
- Stanovoy Ridge

The mountain belt of Southern Siberia is located in the center of Asia. It separates the West Siberian Plain and the Central Siberian Plateau from the internal semi-desert and desert plateaus of Central Asia.

This complex system of mountain ranges and massifs consists of the Altai, Western and Eastern Sayan, Tuva, Baikal and Transbaikalia mountains, the Stanovoy Range and the Aldan Highlands and stretches along the southern borders of Russia from the Irtysh to the Amur region for 4,500 km. Several characteristic features can be identified for this territory:
1. dominance of medium-high and high folded-block mountains, which are separated by large and small basins;
2. year-round action of continental air masses;
3. altitudinal zonation (mountain-taiga forests and mountain tundra on the slopes of ridges are combined with forest-steppe and steppe areas in intermountain basins).

Relief of the mountains of Southern Siberia

The mountains were formed as a result of powerful tectonic movements back in the eras of the Baikal, Caledonian and Hercynian folding at the junction of large blocks of the earth's crust - the Chinese and Siberian platforms. During the Paleozoic and Mesozoic, almost all mountain structures were destroyed and leveled. Thus, the modern relief of the mountains of Southern Siberia was formed not so long ago in Quaternary times under the influence of recent tectonic movements and processes of intense river erosion. All the mountains of Southern Siberia belong to the fold-block revivals.

The relief of the mountains of Southern Siberia is characterized by contrast and a large amplitude of relative heights. The Main Region is dominated by strongly dissected mid-mountain ridges with heights from 800 to 2000 m. On the slopes of high alpine ridges with narrow ridges and peaks up to 3000-4000 m there are glaciers and eternal snow. The Altai Mountains are the highest, where the highest point in all of Siberia is located - Mount Belukha (4506 m).
In the past, mountain building was accompanied by earthquakes, faults of the earth's crust and the introduction of intrusions with the formation of various ore deposits of minerals; in some areas these processes are still ongoing. This mountain belt belongs to the seismic regions of Russia; the strength of individual earthquakes can reach 5-7 points.

Mineral deposits: ore, copper, coal

Large deposits of iron ores were formed here in Mountain Shoria and Khakassia, polymetallic ores in the Salair Ridge and Altai, copper (Udokan deposit) and gold in Transbaikalia, tin (Sherlovaya Mountain in the Chita region), aluminum ores, mercury, molybdenum and tungsten. This region is also rich in reserves of mica, graphite, asbestos and building materials.
Large intermountain basins (Kuznetsk, Minusinsk, Tuva, etc.) are composed of loose clastic deposits carried down from the ridges, which are associated with a thick thickness of hard and brown coals. In terms of reserves, the Kuznetsk basin ranks third in the country, second only to the Tunguska and Lena basins. More than half of Russia's total industrial reserves of coking coal are concentrated in the basin. In terms of accessibility for industrial development (advantageous geographical location, many seams lie close to the surface, etc.) and high quality of coal, this basin has no equal in Russia. A number of brown coal deposits have been discovered in the basins of Transbaikalia (Gusinoozersk, Chernovskie mines).

The entire mountain system of Southern Siberia is located in the interior of the continent, so its climate is continental. Continentality increases to the east, as well as along the southern slopes of the mountains. Heavy rainfall occurs on the windward slopes. There are especially many of them on the western slopes of Altai (about 2000 mm per year). Therefore, its peaks are covered with snow and glaciers, the largest in Siberia. On the eastern slopes of the mountains, as well as in the mountains of Transbaikalia, the amount of precipitation decreases to 300-500 mm per year. There is even less precipitation in the intermountain basins.

In winter, almost all the mountains of Southern Siberia are under the influence of the Asian maximum atmospheric pressure. The weather is cloudless, sunny, with low temperatures. It is especially cold in intermountain basins, in which heavy air flowing from the mountains stagnates. The temperature in winter in the basins drops to -50...-60°C. Against this background, Altai especially stands out. Cyclones often penetrate here from the west, accompanied by significant cloudiness and snowfall. Clouds protect the surface from cooling. As a result, Altai winters differ from other areas of Siberia in their great softness and abundance of precipitation. Summer in most of the mountains is short and cool. However, in the basins it is usually dry and hot with an average July temperature of +20°C.

In general, the mountains of Southern Siberia are an accumulator within the arid continental plains of Eurasia. Therefore, the largest rivers of Siberia - the Irtysh, Biya and Katun - the sources of the Ob; originate in them; Yenisei, Lena, Vitim, Shilka and Argun are the sources of the Amur.
The rivers flowing from the mountains are rich in hydropower. Mountain rivers fill lakes located in deep basins with water, and above all the largest and most beautiful lakes in Siberia - Baikal and Teletskoye.

54 rivers flow into Baikal, and only one river flows out - the Angara. Its deepest lake basin in the world contains gigantic reserves of fresh water. The volume of its waters is equal to the entire Baltic Sea and accounts for 20% of the world's and 80% of the internal volumes of fresh water. The water of Lake Baikal is very clean and transparent. It can be used for drinking without any cleaning or treatment. The lake is home to about 800 species of animals and plants, including such valuable commercial fish as omul and grayling. Seals also live in Baikal. Currently, a number of large industrial enterprises and cities have been built on the banks of Lake Baikal and the rivers flowing into it. As a result, the unique qualities of its waters began to deteriorate. In accordance with government decisions, a number of measures are being taken to protect nature in the lake basin to maintain the cleanliness of the reservoir.

Differences in temperatures and the degree of moisture on mountain slopes are directly reflected in the nature of the soil and vegetation cover of the mountains, in the manifestation of altitudinal zonation. Steppes rise along the slopes of Altai to a height of 500 m in the north and 1500 m in the south. In the past, feather grass and mixed-grass steppes were also located along the bottom of intermountain basins. Nowadays, the fertile black soils of the steppe basins are almost completely plowed. Above the steppe belt, on the damp western slopes of Altai, there are spruce-fir forests with an admixture of cedar. In the drier Sayan Mountains, the Baikal Mountains and Transbaikalia, pine-larch forests dominate. Mountain taiga permafrost soils formed under the forests. The upper part of the forest belt is occupied by dwarf cedar. In Transbaikalia and the Aldan Highlands, the forest zone almost entirely consists of shrub thickets of dwarf cedar. Above the forests in Altai there are subalpine and alpine meadows. In the Sayan Mountains, on the Baikal and Aldan highlands, where it is much colder, the upper sections of the mountains are occupied by mountain tundra with dwarf birch.

Altai Mountains, Gorny Altai:

Location: Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China
Age: 400-300 million years.

Name	Length, km.	Highest point
Altai	2000	Belukha	4 506
Southern Altai	180	Tavan-Bogdo-Ula	4 082
		Kirey	3 790
		Argamdzhi city	3 511
Central Altai	450	Belukha	4 506
		Maashey-Bash	4 175
		Irbistu	3 958
Eastern Altai	360	Tapdwire	3 505
		Sary-Nohoit	3 502
		Sarzhematy	3499
North-Eastern Altai	210	Kurkure-Bazhi	3 111
		Altyn-Kalyak	2 899
		Katuyarykbazhi	2 881
Northwestern Altai	400	Lineisky Belok	2 599
		Belok Chemchedai	2 520
		Sarlyk	2 507
Northern Altai	400	Albagan city	2 618
		Peak Karasu	2 557
		Akkaya	2 384

Salair:

Location: Russia
Age: 400-300 million years.

Kuznetsk Alatau:

Location: Russia
Age: 400-300 million years.

Location: Russia, Mongolia
Age: 1000-450 million years.

Mountains of Tuva:

Location: Russia
Age: 1200-550 million years.

Mountains of the Baikal region:

Location: Russia
Age: 1200-550 million years.

Name	Length, km.	Highest point	Altitude above sea level, m.
Baikal region	2230	Peak Baikal	2 841
Baikal ridge	300	Chersky	2 588
Primorsky Ridge	350	Three-headed Loach	1 728
Khamar-Daban	350	Khan-Ula	2 371
Ulan-Burgasy	200	Hurhag	2 049
Barguzinsky ridge	280	Peak Baikal	2 841
Ikat ridge	200	Top 2573	2 573
Verkhneangarsky ridge	200	Top 2641	2 641
Dzhidinsky ridge	350	Sardag-Uil	2 027

Mountains of Transbaikalia:

Location: Russia, Mongolia, China
Age: 1600-1000 million years.

Name	Length, km.	Highest point	Altitude above sea level, m.
Transbaikalia	4370	Pike BAM	3 081
Stanovoye Highlands	700	Pike BAM	3 081
Patomskoye Highlands	300	Summit 1924	1 924
Vitim Plateau	500	Summit 1753	1 753
Apple Ridge	650	Golets Kantalaksky	1 706
OlekminskyStanovik	500	Golets Kropotkina	1 908
Borschovochny ridge	450	Sakhanda	2 499
Khentei-Daur Plateau	350	Bystrinsky Golets	2 519
Chersky Ridge	650	Chingikan
Name	Length, km.	Highest point	Altitude above sea level, m.
Stanovoy Ridge	750	Top 2321	2 321
		Top 2258	2 258
		Ayumkan city	2 255

Along the southern borders of Russia, from the Irtysh to the Amur region, one of the largest mountain belts in the world stretches for 4.5 thousand km. It consists of the Altai Mountains, the Western and Eastern Sayans, the Baikal region, the Transbaikalia highlands, the Stanovoy Range and the Aldan Highlands. The mountains formed within a giant geosynclinal zone. It arose as a result of the interaction of large blocks of the earth's crust - the Chinese and Siberian platforms. These platforms are part of the Eurasian lithospheric plate and experience significant horizontal movements, which in the zone of their contact are accompanied by folding of sedimentary rocks and the formation of mountains, faults of the earth's crust and the introduction of granite intrusions, earthquakes, and the formation of various (ore and non-metallic) mineral deposits. The mountains were formed during the Baikal, Caledonian and Hercynian folding eras. During the Paleozoic and Mesozoic, mountain structures were destroyed and leveled. The clastic material was carried into intermountain basins, where thick layers of hard and brown coals simultaneously accumulated. In Neogene-Quaternary times, as a result of intense movements of the earth's crust, large deep faults were formed. Large intermountain basins arose in the subsided areas - Minusinsk, Kuznetsk, Baikal, Tuva, on the elevated ones there are medium-high and partially high mountains. The highest Altai mountains, where the highest point in all of Siberia is Mount Belukha (4506 m). Thus, all the mountains of Southern Siberia are epiplatform folded-block regenerated. Vertical and horizontal movements of the earth's crust continue, so this entire belt belongs to the seismic regions of Russia, where the strength of earthquakes can reach 5-7 points. Particularly strong earthquakes occur in the area lake Baikal.

Tectonic movements of the earth's crust were accompanied by processes of magmatism and metamorphism, which led to the formation of large deposits of various ores - iron and base metals in Altai, copper and gold in Transbaikalia.

The entire mountain system is located inland, so its climate is continental. Continentality increases to the east, as well as along the southern slopes of the mountains. Heavy rainfall occurs on the windward slopes. There are especially many of them on the western slopes of Altai (about 2000 mm per year). Therefore, its peaks are covered with snow and glaciers, the largest in Siberia. On the eastern slopes of the mountains, as well as in the mountains of Transbaikalia, the amount of precipitation decreases to 300-500 mm per year. There is even less precipitation in the intermountain basins.

In winter, almost all mountains Southern Siberia are influenced by the Asian maximum atmospheric pressure. The weather is cloudless, sunny, with low temperatures. It is especially cold in intermountain basins, in which heavy air flowing from the mountains stagnates. The winter temperature in the basins drops to -50...-60 ° C. Altai especially stands out against this background. Cyclones often penetrate here from the west, accompanied by significant cloudiness and snowfall. Clouds protect the surface from cooling. As a result, Altai winters differ from other areas of Siberia in their great softness and abundance of precipitation. Summer in most of the mountains is short and cool. However, in the basins it is usually dry and hot with an average July temperature of +20 ° C.

The rivers flowing from the mountains are rich in hydropower. Mountain rivers fill lakes located in deep basins with water, and above all the largest and most beautiful lakes in Siberia - Baikal and Teletskoye.

Differences in temperatures and the degree of moisture on mountain slopes are directly reflected in the nature of the soil and vegetation cover of the mountains, in the manifestation of altitudinal zonation. Steppes rise along the slopes of Altai to a height of 500 m in the north and 1500 m in the south. In the past, feather grass and mixed-grass steppes were also located along the bottom of intermountain basins. Nowadays, the fertile black soils of the steppe basins are almost completely plowed. Above the steppe belt, on the damp western slopes of Altai, there are spruce-fir forests with an admixture of cedar. In drier climates Sayan Mountains, Baikal Mountains and Transbaikalia pine-larch forests dominate. Mountain taiga permafrost soils formed under the forests. The upper part of the forest belt is occupied by dwarf cedar. In Transbaikalia and Aldan Highlands The forest zone consists almost entirely of dwarf pine shrub thickets. Above the forests in Altai there are subalpine and alpine meadows. In the Sayan Mountains, on the Baikal and Aldan highlands, where it is much colder, the upper sections of the mountains are occupied by mountain tundra with dwarf birch.

One of the largest mountain systems on the continent, stretching for 4,500 kilometers, with a total area of more than one and a half million square kilometers, is the mountains of Southern Siberia. Hidden in the depths of Asia, starting from the plains of the west and extending to the coast, these chains form a watershed between the great Siberian rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean, and the no less famous reservoirs of the Far East, giving their waters to the Pacific.

The mountain belt of Southern Siberia has a significant height above sea level and is clearly divided into landscape zones. More than 60% is occupied by the mountain surface along its entire length, highly rugged, with huge amplitudes of heights, which is due to the wide variety of terrain and contrasts of natural and climatic conditions.

Geology

The mountains of Southern Siberia were not formed overnight. First, tectonic uplifts occurred in the Baikal region and in the Eastern Sayan Mountains, as evidenced by Precambrian and Lower Paleozoic rocks. In the Paleozoic, the Altai, Western Sayan and Salair ranges were formed. Later than everyone else, already in the Mesozoic, the Eastern Transbaikalia rose. Mountain formation continues to this day, as evidenced by annual earthquakes and movements of the earth's crust in the form of slow subsidence or uplift. The mountains of Southern Siberia were also formed under the influence of the Quaternary glaciation. Glaciers covered not only all the massifs in a thick layer, but also extended far out onto the plains of the southwest. It was the glaciers that dissected the ridges and formed rocky niches, due to which the ridges became narrow and sharp, the slopes became steep, and the gorges became deep.

Climate and relief types

Throughout the entire length of the territory, the mountains of Southern Siberia have negative average annual temperatures, that is, long winters with very severe frosts. On the western slopes, summer is rainy, the snow cover is very thick - up to three meters. For this reason, the mountains of Southern Siberia in these places are covered with damp taiga (fir, cedar), there are many swamps and magnificent meadows. On the eastern slopes and in the basins there is much less precipitation, summers are hot and very dry, and the landscapes are most often steppe. Among all of Southern Siberia, only the Altai, the Eastern Sayan Mountains and the only ones that rise beyond the snow boundaries are glaciers. There are especially many of them in Altai - 900 square kilometers of glaciation.

Home of great rivers

It is there that all the great Siberian rivers originate: Ob, Irtysh, Yenisei, Lena, Amur. At first they flow in narrow picturesque valleys between steep inaccessible cliffs. The current is incredibly fast - the slopes of the riverbed reach several tens of meters per kilometer of movement. At the bottom of almost all rivers, glaciers left traces in the form of curly rocks, crossbars and moraines. The mountains of Southern Siberia, the map of which is studied even in school, have formed lakes of exceptional beauty in their basins and circuses. There are many of them, and some are more beautiful than others. For example, cascade Multinskie in Altai, Teletskoye there - a local pearl, and amazing Aya. Grandiose and magnificent - Baikal. Markakol, Ulug-Khol, Todzha are beautiful.

Answer from Condorita[guru]
The Altai Mountains represent a complex system of the highest ridges in Siberia, separated by deep river valleys and vast intramountain and intermountain basins.
The mountain system is divided into several distinct parts: Southern Altai (Southwestern), Southeastern Altai and Eastern Altai, Central Altai, Northern and Northeastern Altai, Northwestern Altai.
Source: wiki

Answer from 2 answers[guru]

Hello! Here is a selection of topics with answers to your question: the highest mountains of Siberia.

Answer from $-=Tr?k=-$[active]
what's the question?

Answer from Anastasia T[guru]
Sayans probably

Answer from On Indyukov[guru]
Peak Belukha, 4506 m, the highest point in Siberia and the Far East.
This means Altai.
Then the Eastern Sayans - Munku Sardyk peak height 3450 m
Then the Chersky ridge Buordakh massif Mount Pobeda 3147 m.

Answer from Peter Knyazev[guru]
Belukha
Sayan Mountains

Answer from Anastasia Atamanchuk[guru]
Mount Belukha is one of the largest mountain peaks in Russia, the highest peak in Siberia at 4506 m above sea level. In 1998, it was included in the list of UNESCO World Natural Heritage Sites "Altai - Golden Mountains".
Belukha is the highest peak in Altai and Siberia. Its peak reaches a height of 4506 meters above sea level. Three spurs of the Katunsky ridge of Central Altai form a snow-white sparkling crown - the two-headed Belukha. One of the first explorers of Altai, Vasily Sapozhnikov, associated the name of the mountain with the unmelting snow on its slopes. Other names for Belukha were given by the ancient Turks: Kadyn-Bazhi (peak of Katun), Ak-Suru (majestic), Musdutuu (ice mountain), Uch-Ayry (mountain with three branches).
The Belukha area is located in a zone of high seismic activity, so microearthquakes are very frequent here. The climate here is very harsh: cold winters with frosts of twenty degrees and short rainy summers, often with snowfalls. On the slopes of the Belukha massif and in the valleys, researchers discovered 169 glaciers - with a total area of 150 square kilometers. The largest Belukha glacier, which is also one of the largest glaciers in Altai in general, is the Sapozhnikov glacier, 10.5 kilometers long.
Occasionally in the mountains you can see lynx, snow leopard, and Siberian mountain goat. Of the birds, the most common are white and tundra partridges, alpine jackdaws, and Himalayan Accentors; the Siberian mountain finch and juniper grosbeak are less common. If you're lucky, you can see a golden eagle listed in the Red Book of the Altai Republic.
Belukha is a sacred mountain. Here, according to Buddhist legends, lies the legendary transcendental land of the gods Shambhala, a paradise that will appear to the world after people disappear from the face of the Earth. According to legend, it was from here that Gautama Buddha came to India. The famous philosopher and artist Nicholas Roerich visited these places at the beginning of the last century, studying the roots of Buddhism, and glorified them throughout the world.
Mount Belukha has always attracted climbers, tourists, lovers of mountain river rafting, and followers of Nicholas Roerich.

The Russian people, having come to Siberia, did not immediately understand that its great rivers flow from the mountains - after all, in Rus' the Volga, the Dnieper and Don, and both Dvinas are born on flat hills. However, the mountainous nature of the upper reaches of Siberian rivers was reminiscent of either their summer high water supply, fed by the melting of mountain snows and glaciers, or the rubble and pebbles carried by ice drifts to the northern plains. The higher the explorers climbed along the Irtysh, Ob and Yenisei, the more indisputable it became that to the south of the Siberian plains the frontier of a completely new mountain world was rising like a continuous barrier.

We return from the Far East to the borders of High Siberia and find ourselves in a vast natural country that extends far beyond the borders of the Soviet Union - into the territory of western Mongolia. A wide strip of the Siberian-Mongolian uplift covers the middle part of the Pamir-Chukchi mountain belt, and it contains the most diverse structures, including the entire south and southeast of High Siberia. As a result of this uplift, the Stanovoi ridge and highlands, the Transbaikalia, Sayan, Altai mountains and the highlands of the adjacent part of Mongolia - the Mongolian Altai, Khangai and Khentei - arose. Complexly dissected mountainous countries alternate with large depressions and high plateaus.

The folds hug the southern protrusion of the Siberian Platform like the Irkutsk Amphitheater. In its eastern wing, the north-eastern strikes of ancient structures, parallel to the pre-Baikal edge of the platform, predominate, in the western wing - north-west, like in the Eastern Sayan. The zones closest to the platform, considered at one time the “ancient crown of Asia,” were built by Baikalides (late Precambrian folds) - such are the subsoil of the Stanovoy Highlands, the Baikal region and the Eastern Sayan. In Transbaikalia from Shilka to Selenga, in the west of the Sayan Mountains and in the northeast of Altai, Early Paleozoic folds and granite intrusions predominate, and in the southwest of Altai, in the southern and southeastern Transbaikalia - Late Paleozoic folds. In the Mesozoic, structures in the southeast became more active—the influence of the independent Mongol-Okhotsk zone of deflections and shears extended here.

The strikes of ancient folds are also inherited by many new faults: most of the ridges and basins in Transbaikalia and on both wings of the Irkutsk amphitheater, including Baikal itself, extend in the same directions.

Recent uplifts have raised to various heights vast, leveled surfaces that cut off structures of any age in the mountains of southern Siberia. Many of them were then dissected and formed monotonous flat-topped, often medium-high, ridges with extensive areas of ridge plateaus. Above them, only in the form of separate “islands,” rise massifs with jagged ridges and pyramidal peaks, corroded by ancient and modern glacial cirques.

Young volcanoes and frequent earthquakes, which reach particular strength in the Stanovoi Upland, in the Baikal-Kosogol depression zone crossing the Soviet-Mongolian border, and abroad - in the Khangai and Gobi Altai, but are also known in our Altai and the Sayan Mountains, remind us of the ongoing mobility.

In winter, this mountain kingdom is shackled by the Siberian cold, although it is often warmer in the mountains than at the foothills, where the heavy cold air stagnates. In summer, the heat of Central Asia spreads here, which is rivaled only by the icy ridges and snow squirrels of Kodar, Sayan and Altai. Summer precipitation is especially predominant here - after all, it is in summer that moderately warm air masses come into contact and interact with tropical Central Asian ones for a long time, and a series of cyclones move along the front, bringing rain. It coincides with a strip of mountains, frontal processes intensify, and this increases the release of moisture, primarily on the windward slopes of the highlands. The western air currents bringing it penetrate all the way to Transbaikalia.

In the eastern part of the mountains, the same summer, but lower maximum of cyclonic rains is combined with additional moisture from the summer monsoons reaching here from the Far East. All this moisture feeds the great rivers of Siberia and the sources of the Amur. The mountainous terrain and high water content of the rivers create huge reserves of hydropower.

To the west, the humidity of the climate increases and its continentality decreases - the strength of winter frosts, the range of daily and annual temperatures decreases, and permafrost decreases. Therefore, the nature of the Transbaikal east is more meager than the Altai-Sayan west, where, by the way, the ancient glaciation was more powerful.

Many of the foothills and lower slopes of the mountains of Transbaikalia, Sayan and Altai, up to the level of the first hundred, or even one and a half thousand meters, are occupied by steppes and even semi-deserts. It dominates, especially on siverakh- northern slopes of the ridges - mountain taiga, often light coniferous, larch - foliage- with a sparse “park” forest stand. Only on the wetter outer slopes are they replaced by dark coniferous taiga - spruce-fir and black (fir with aspen).

On the southern slopes of the ridges - sunshine— mountain-steppe landscapes penetrate from Inner Eurasia. Their border with the mountain taiga whimsically follows the unevenness of the relief. Steppes and even semi-deserts are characteristic of the most closed intermountain depressions. Where the ridges are located in several parallel latitudinal rows, the landscapes of their opposite slopes alternate accordingly - mountain-taiga and mountain-steppe.

Above 2000 meters there are mountain forests, and on the southern ridges and slopes the mountain steppes give way to subalpine and alpine meadows, which in Siberia are famous for their lushness, bright colors, richness of species and high nutritional value of herbs. Abundant herds and flocks graze here. Even yaks are bred in the mountain steppes of the far south - a sign that it is not so far from here to Tibet. Vast spaces above the mountain meadows, and in the more northern mountains and immediately above the forest border are occupied by mountain tundra and stone placers.

And the fauna combines Siberian taiga and Central Asian steppes, and above the forest line even tundra northerners - reindeer, tundra partridge. These penetrated here during the shift of the tundra to the south during periods of glaciation.

The mountains of Southern Siberia are a storehouse of minerals, comparable in abundance and diversity to the Urals. Coal basins, led by Kuzbass, are located along the entire length of the mountains. Ores of iron, non-ferrous and rare metals, including the tin-bearing Transbaikalia, the phenomenal copper ore Udokan, the polymetallic Rudny Altai; gold in a number of places, including the Aldana and Bodaibo mines; mica and gems - all this gave rise to many mining landscapes.

But the nature of the South Siberian Mountains is inhabited by people in an extremely uneven and mosaic manner. Densely populated areas with an industrial landscape (Kuzbass, Rudny Altai) and cultivated lands alternate with huge tracts of almost virgin mountain taiga swamps and steppes.

Baikal-Aldan upland strip, despite the extreme antiquity of the structures - the outskirts of the Siberian Platform and its Aldan Shield, forms a highly mobile belt from the Dzhugdzhur Mountains of Okhotsk to the northern tip of Lake Baikal. The predominant rocks here are also ancient - crystalline schists, gneisses, quartzites, as well as the porphyries and granites embedded in them. In the Meso-Cenozoic, the subsoil was also penetrated by younger intrusions of magma.

The climate here is harsh in Yakut style: stagnation of cold air in the basins is accompanied by frosts up to 65°, cool summers; It’s hot, and even then not for long, it only happens at the bottom of the basins. The soil is bound to great depths by permafrost. Precipitation in the basins is less than 350, and in the lower reaches of Olekma only 240 millimeters per year, but in the mountains their amount increases to 500 - 1000 millimeters. The remnants of Atlantic moisture, squeezed out of cyclones, are supplemented by moisture from the Far Eastern monsoons that also reach here.

The larch taiga with Daurian rhododendron in the undergrowth dominates. Only rare larch trees and mosses survive in swampy basins. Above 1200 meters above the crooked forests of stone birch and thickets of dwarf cedar lie vast plateaus - mountain tundras. There are stone placers on the loaches.

The highlands stretch in two stripes - the northern one is more massive and flatter than the mountainous southern one. Along the chain of basins separating these stripes, that is, precisely in the zone of active seismicity, the route of the Baikal-Amur Mainline was laid. At first, the builders did not take this into account and did not even provide for the costs of anti-seismic measures. But the very first tunnels surprised us with the abundance of cracks filled with finely crushed rubble, hot waters and other surprises of “moving” dungeons. In the area of the North Muisky Tunnel alone there are up to 700 tremors per year. A lot had to be finalized on the fly.

The eastern bastion of the highland belt at the junction with Dzhugdzhur is formed by the complexly built Aldan-May and Yudomo-May highlands, rising in the corner part of the ancient Aldan shield. Another section of the shield is raised in the form of the Aldan Highlands as part of the Pamir-Chukchi belt. The plateaus, occupied by swampy larch taiga, hide gold, mica, piezoquartz, coal and even apatites in their depths.

Gold associated with quartz veins and subsequent redeposition in the weathering crust was discovered here only in 1922. The Nezametny Key became the site of a mine with the same name - now it is the city of Aldan, the heart of the gold mining region, no less popular than the long-known Leno-Vitim Bodaibo. Placers washed by dredges resemble sand and gravel wastelands and even dune deserts - they have yet to be reclaimed. Nearby, in Tommot, the Aldanslyuda plant mines phlogopite, and near Seligdar, an “agronomic ore” - apatite, precious for Siberia and the Far East - was discovered.

The outskirts of the Aldan Highlands with an area of about 8.5 thousand square kilometers, adjacent to the Olekma River, were declared the Olekma Nature Reserve in 1984.

The chain of depressions adjacent to the Stanovoi Range from the north turned out to be an arena of coal formation in the Jurassic. Reserves of excellent coking coal in the South Yakutsk basin amount to tens of billions of tons! Black-walled canyons cut by rivers in solid coal seams 20-60 meters thick have long been known, but the lack of roads forced such riches to be kept in vain. Now the “small BAM” has been brought to Berkakit, and the coal-mining Chulmansky region has received access to the Trans-Siberian Railway. Coal is already being mined at the gigantic open-pit mine in Neryungri, reminiscent of a lunar crater.

The base of the South Yakut territorial-production complex being created here will also be the billions of tons of iron ore of the Charo-Tokka basin discovered to the west of the Olekmo-Chara Highlands. A significant part of them can also be mined directly from the surface. Metallurgists could only dream of such a proximity of coal and ores!

Between Chara, Vitim and Lena’s tribe stretches the Patom Highlands. Here, in the middle of the 19th century, the Bodaibo gold-bearing area was discovered - it was this area that became known as the Lena gold mines and as the site of a tragic event - the Lena execution in 1912. Until the discovery of Aldan and Kolyma gold, Bodaibo was the main source of its production in the country.

The mine receives energy from the Mamakan hydroelectric power station, built in 1961 at the mouth of the Mamakan on the shores of Vitim - it was the first of its kind in deep permafrost conditions.

North Baikal, the westernmost of the northern series of uplands, only in the south, in the Inyap-tuk mountain range, exceeds 2.5 kilometers. The rest is taiga plateaus with altitudes of 1-1.5 kilometers.

The main mineral treasure here is mica - muscovite. The Mamsko-Chuysky mica-bearing region is located on the left bank of Vitim. Among the many deposits of non-ferrous metal ores, there is a promising rich deposit of polymetallic ores in the valley of the Kholodnaya River, flowing towards Baikal. During its development, new complex problems will arise to prevent pollution of the lake with waste.

The southern row of highlands of the Baikal-Aldan belt is formed in the east by the mountain system of the Stanovoy Range, and in the west by the Stanovoy Highlands. In both names, the title “stanovoy” has a connotation of a core, axial, reminiscent of something like the spinal column in the skeleton. But neither the highlands nor the ridge justify such significance.

The mid-altitude Stanovoy Range stretches 700 km from Dzhugdzhur in the east to the through Olekma gorge in the west. The interoceanic (Lena-Amur) watershed passes along it only to the east of the pass, through which it was crossed by the Amur-Yakut highway (AYAM) and the “small BAM”. To the west, this watershed more than once slides from one longitudinal chain to another, so it would be more accurate to call this system not a ridge, but the Stanovoi Mountains. Only occasionally do alpine-type chars rise here - such as the Skalisty char, more than 2.5 km high, at the junction with Dzhugdzhur.

The most amazing part of the highland strip is Stanovoye Highlands, continuing to the west the chain of the Stanovoy Range. Together with it, it was raised as part of a common shaft-shaped vault. The name of the neighbor was mechanically transferred to it, although there is nothing “stagnant” in this highland. It does not bear the main watershed of Siberia at all, and none of the ridges forms a barrier (“camp”) on any important pass route. The highland is separated from the Stanovoy Range by the deep through Olekma gorge and is itself torn apart by the Vitim gorge, which is also through. The main watershed of the continent is pushed far to the south here, into the middle Transbaikalia.

The subsoil of the highlands is extremely mobile. During the Neogene and Quaternary times its structures rose by more than 2 km, and in the Kodar ridge up to 3 km. The basins that lagged behind during this uplift and even subsided lie on the northeastern continuation of the Baikal-Kosogol strip of depressions with bottoms at levels of 500-900 m.

If the Verkhneangarsk basin had dropped another fifty meters, it would have been flooded by the lengthening Baikal. To the east in the same strip are the Muisko-Kuyanda and Charskaya depressions. All of them are as seismic as those occupied by Baikal, and this has been confirmed more than once in recent years. To the south of the upper reaches of the Chara, even young volcanoes have been discovered on the basalt plateaus of Udokan.

The highest ridge of the Stanovoi Upland, Kodar has only recently appeared on maps. Its peak, which rises over 3 km, is supposed to be called the peak of the BAM, and through the ridge the builders of the highway punched the Kodar tunnel over 2 km long. The recent discovery of a real alpine highland here with 36 glaciers was a scientific sensation. Now you can admire the harsh grandeur of these new “Siberian Alps” from airplane windows on the Moscow-Khabarovsk highway.

The Chara Basin is a rare natural phenomenon. In beds with permafrost soil there are dead lakes, the bottom of which is barren for any organisms. The acute continental climate with long periods of stagnation of terribly cold air leads not only to treelessness, but even to the blowing of sands: the strip Tuculans- dunes of sandy ridges of Central Asian appearance, stretching for tens of kilometers, looks like an absurd paradox in permafrost conditions.

It has already been proposed to protect all these wonders of nature in a single Kodaro-Chara National Park, and just in time: the BAM route passing through the Chara Basin will bring to life the use of generous natural resources, and with it drastic transformations of nature, which should not be left unmanaged.Among the measures to protect it, we will also mention the Tokki Nature Reserve. It was created in 1980 on the Olekmo-Chara Highlands on an area of more than 7 thousand square kilometers.

Chara and Kodar have a great future. This is where the “mining triangle” will arise. Its basis is the magnificent proximity of the Charo-Tokki iron ores of Sulumata and the copper ores of Udokan with the coking coals of Apsata in the Kodara Mountains. High above their base, right on the slopes, a 40-meter black layer of coal is visible, waiting to be mined. The ridge is cut through by the rapids of rivers rushing to the north - the Chara and its tributary Tokko - it is here that the iron ore belt stretches from Yakutia to the Chita region for as much as one and a half hundred kilometers.

Chara suggests the creation of a coal and metallurgical center. But will it be easy to live here? Stagnant cold weather and poor ventilation promise frequent smog. Perhaps we will have to look for better ventilated places outside the basin for future cities?

Great glory is destined for Udokan. Information about his wealth seemed like a legend for a long time. In Bazhov's fairy tale, the Mistress of the Copper Mountain lived in the depths of the Urals. And the Udokan ridge itself turned out to be the master of the copper mountain in the real sense of the word: a gigantic whole-ore deposit of Naminga copper sandstones has been explored here. Now the Baikal-Amur Mainline has approached the foot of the ridge, and the development of Udokan has become a reality. The ore will not be lifted from the depths, but will be brought down from the mountains.

Mighty rapids rivers promise to provide large amounts of hydropower. Three powerful hydroelectric power stations can be built on one middle reaches of the Vitim - there are convenient sites in any of the through gorges when the river breaks through the Muisky and Delyun-Uransky ridges, and even lower, within the Patom Highlands. In the gorge cutting through the Yuzhno-Muysky ridge, where the Tuzaman Shiver bubbles, near the village with the “promising” name Much Promising, it is proposed to erect a dam at the Mokskaya Hydroelectric Power Station with a capacity of 1.7 million kilowatts. In the Olekma gap, separating the Stanovoye ridge and the highlands, it is possible to install a dam for the Khani hydroelectric power station with a capacity of over 1 million kilowatts, and in other gorges there are two more hydroelectric stations of approximately the same capacity.

To the south of the Baikal-Aldan highlands stretches one of our most extensive mountain systems. Its length reaches one and a half thousand, and its width is over five hundred kilometers. She should be called Khentey-Transbaikal mountainous country- after all, the southwestern extremity of this strip of mountains goes into Mongolia and, in the form of the Khentei ridge, adorns the panorama of its capital, Ulaanbaatar.

Often it is in this area and over the north of Mongolia that the center of the stable Mongolian-Siberian maximum of atmospheric pressure is located, and with it the anticyclonic stagnation of a huge mass of cold air. That’s why the winter here is severely frosty and has little snow; summer, on the contrary, passes under the sign of the invasion of tropical air from the Gobi, although the heat, of course, is softened by the coolness of the mountain rises.

Transbaikalia, when you cross it, it seems monotonous. Over a colossal space, low and medium-altitude ridges lined up as if in an oblique line in one direction - diagonally to the degree network. Both the depth and density of their division into secondary ridges, spurs, and hills are of the same type. The longitudinal valleys, already wide, are studded like rosaries with chains of lake-like basins (and in the past, lakes actually existed in some of them). The slopes have the same steepness; on the northern shady ones, Daurian larch forests are common, on the hot southern ones there are steppes. This alternation of seaweeds and sunburnts creates pictures of mountain forest-steppe, which are also quite monotonous. Many things bear the mark of permafrost; it is distributed so far to the south that it even crosses the border of our country.

And yet this land, upon closer inspection, turns out to be full of charm. Chekhov wrote well about this: “I’ll just say that Selenga is sheer beauty, and in Transbaikalia I found everything I wanted: the Caucasus, and the Psla valley, and Zvenigorod district, and the Don. During the day I gallop across the Caucasus, at night along the Don steppe, and in the morning, waking up from my slumber, lo and behold, it’s already the Poltava province, and so on for the whole thousand miles.” In a word, the monotony of the background is combined with a variety of details and, moreover, with external severity, the great generosity of nature.

There are also differences between large parts of the vast mountain kingdom. In the northeast, the ridges and valleys are more diffuse, turning into vast plateaus - Olekminsky Stanovik and Vitimsky. On the second of them, volcanoes were active quite recently - 12 fresh cinder cones rise on the basalt plateau. Earthquakes up to magnitude 7 also occur.

In the southwest and south, the dissection is deeper and denser - there are up to 15 parallel ridges and the same number of stripes of valleys and basins. The corrugation of long-aligned structures continued from the Mesozoic to the present and was inherited: the swells grew into ridges, and the products of their erosion accumulated in the valleys that continued to bend. When viewed from an airplane, the pattern of longitudinal ridges and valleys resembles the petrified swell of the ocean. But the shafts and hollows of this swell are not combed by the wind. They are subject to the directions of deep and recent compression and faults.

In some flat-bottomed valleys there are lakes - Eravnye in the upper reaches of Vitim, Arakhleiskie near Chita. These are evidence of greater lakes in the region in the past, under a different climate. As it became drier, landscapes akin to the Mongolian Gobi penetrated into the basins. Lakes and rivers began to dry up, rubble from the mountains covered the bases with cloaks, the wind began to blow out niches and strange figures in the rocks, just like in the deserts.

An interoceanic watershed runs through the mountains of Transbaikalia, but none of the ridges that bear it stand out either in height or in axial position—there is no main one among them. The upper reaches of the rivers of the Pacific (Amur) and Ice-Vitombr (Lena) slopes cut so unevenly and discordantly into the rising plateaus that the whimsically winding watershed often slides from one ridge to another, or even runs straight along swampy planes.

In the south, on the elevated Khentei-Chikoy Plateau, but away from the watershed, the highest peaks of Transbaikalia are raised - the Berun-Shibertui (2523 meters) and Sokhondo (2499 meters) chars. Seismicity increases to 8 points, and the ridges bear traces of small ancient glaciers. Part of the territory, as a standard of combinations of the Siberian mountain taiga with char and areas of the Dauro-Mongolian steppes, is protected in the vast Sokhondinsky Nature Reserve.

Transbaikalia is a rare treasury of mineral wealth. A belt of tin-tungsten ores stretches across the entire south, accompanied by even molybdenum, copper and polymetallic ores, and with them, as satellites and ores, many valuable “small” and rare metals. The extraction of tungsten and molybdenum is one of the foundations of the mining industry of Transbaikalia. In the extreme southwest, the “bouquet” of their developments in the Dzhida Valley is important. In the south is the South Daurian tin-bearing region. Khapcheranga is famous, but has already been heavily developed (here they have now switched to the extraction of polymetallic ores). Tin has been completely exhausted - the memory of its tin content remains only in the name. But in the same Nerchinsk Dauria, one of the largest tin deposits in the country is being developed directly from the surface - Sherlova Mountain - its name also reminds of the past: before the discovery of tin ores, the mountain was famous for its Sherla— gems: topazes, smoky quartz, amethysts.

Polymetal ores are mined near Chita and the Shilka and Argun valleys. From the beginning of the 18th century, they were developed for the so-called Nerchinsk factories, although they were located one and a half to two hundred kilometers from the Nercha River and the city of Nerchinsk. These factories, along with the neighboring gold mines, became notorious as the sites of convict prisons during the tsarist period. The words in the song remind us of them: “Shilka and Nerchinsk are not scary now...” The ore deposits that fed these plants have long been worked out. The only old mining site that is still being mined is in Akatui (“I wandered for a long time in the steppes of Akatui,” sang the escaped convict).

Gold mines are strung in a string along the Trans-Siberian Railway at the foot of Olekminsky Stanovik. In the Shilka basin, dredges on the Kara River still operate. The village of Ust-Karsky keeps the sad memory of the Kara penal servitude and the Kara prison.

The fame of Transbaikalia as an iron ore land is also long-standing. From the end of the 18th century, its ores became the base of the Petrovsk-Zabaikalsky iron foundry and ironworks, where the Decembrists served hard labor. Half a billion tons of ore (magnetite and brown iron ore) lie in the Berezovsky Iron Ridge in the southeast.

There are also aluminum raw materials in Transbaikalia - nepheline syenites and sillimanites.

It is difficult to list coal “stokers” with their billions of tons of fuel reserves. Coal is known in the Chikoy depression and in the Tugnui valley, where it can be mined in quarries. Bukachachi coal has been developed for a long time. There are huge layers of brown coal near Goose Lake and Kharanor.

The Oshurkovskoye deposit near Ulan-Ude contains more than a billion tons of apatite. Transbaikalia provides a significant share of the all-Union production of fluorite, the reserves of which reach millions of tons.

More than a hundred mineral springs are associated with ancient and young faults, including many hot ones, for example Pitatelevskie in the Selenga Valley. A network of resorts has developed on the waters - Shivanda, Kuka, Olentui, Urguchan, the Chita Narzan "Darasun" is famous. The carbon dioxide-radon waters of Molokovka near Chita are healing.

There is little precipitation everywhere: in the basins - 200-300, in the mountains - up to 450 millimeters per year. Two-thirds of the rains are late summer, spring and early summer are dry - fields need to be irrigated and pastures need to be watered. There is so little snow in winter that a toboggan path is not installed everywhere; Winter crops die from frost. Many rivers freeze to the bottom - this leads to the formation of ice dams when water breaks through cracks, and groundwater has to be used for water supply.

Rivers can be harnessed to energy: it is not difficult to build half a dozen medium-power hydroelectric power stations on Selenga, and two large ones on Shilka.

The forests of Transbaikalia are huge. Their recovery after logging is hampered by both permafrost and swampiness. In some places, even sand dunes began to move, the area of which in the Selenga Valley and in the Nerchinsk Dauria, in place of cleared forests, increased tenfold only during the 20th century.

Southern Transbaikalia is the eastern edge of the steppe zone of Siberia. In dry depressions on chestnut soils, sparse tufts of cereals with caragana bushes are visible. The slopes are more turfed - this is a mountain forest-steppe; pine-larch and birch copses are visible on the slopes. Here, chernozems are replaced by gray forest soils.

In the south, between the middle and eastern Transbaikalia, the mountains give way to the “bay” of the Mongolian plateaus. In this part of the Nerchinsk Dauria, especially in the basin of the Torey lakes, which are drainless and therefore salty, semi-desert and steppe landscapes of the Gobi type predominate. This is no longer Southern Siberia, but the outskirts of Inner Eurasia,

The main transport artery of the southern Transbaikal region is the great Trans-Siberian Railway. Southeast of Chita, a branch departs from it to the border Transbaikalsk; abroad it continues as the Chinese-Changchun Railway, in the past the Chinese-Eastern Railway (CER). From Ulan-Ude, through the beautiful mountainous basin of Goose Lake, rails lead to the border Kyakhta and further to Mongolia to Ulaanbaatar.

The section of the Selenga Valley adjacent to Goose Lake is a mournful natural-historical memorial, the place of exile of the Decembrists Bestuzhevs and Thorson. The museum created here reminds how, even while in exile, the Decembrists worked inquisitively and fruitfully to study the region - what is one message about the coals of Goose Lake worth!

Baikal region includes the lakeside Transbaikalia in the east and Cisbaikalia in the west, and in general forms a highly elevated and mobile bridge between the Stanov and Sayano-Tuva highlands. Along its axis it is bifurcated by a strip of depressions occupied by Lake Baikal. When viewed from cosmic heights, one can understand that all this is a link in the more extended Baikal-Kosogol strip of depressions. It makes itself felt already in the Stanovoi Upland, and in the southwest it goes to Mongolia, where Baikal’s younger brother Khubsugul (Kosogol) spreads its waters. This strip is a gaping wound on the surface of the Earth (a failure, a split?), the like of which can only be found in eastern Africa.

The mountains are composed of ancient gneisses, crystalline schists, marbles, and granite inclusions. During the subsidence of the basins in the Meso-Cenozoic, thick (2-5 km) strata of continental sediments accumulated. The depressions - Verkhne-Angarskaya, two Baikalskaya, Barguzinskaya, Tunkinskaya - go one after another behind the scenes. I would like to call dry basins unflooded Baikals, especially when on cold mornings they are hidden by an ash-silver canopy of fog, creating the complete illusion of the lake surface.

For a long time, people did not believe in the strong seismicity of these mountains: the label “ancient crown of Asia” created a false idea about the stability of the subsoil. And earthquakes, and strong ones at that, ranging from 1 to 8 points, occurred many times; since 1725 there have been more than three dozen of them. In 1862, an entire section of the Selenga delta sank under water - a bay arose in this place, called the Proval.

The results of recent progress are also captured in the bizarre outlines of the islands rising from the depths of Lake Baikal. Let us first mention the islands of Ushkanya and the more significant Olkhon. It is separated from the opposite steep slopes of the Baikal ridge by straits: wide (it is even called the Small Sea) and narrow - the Olkhon Gate.

Lakeside Transbaikalia is a chain of medium-altitude ridges framing the lake from the east and south: Barguzinsky, Ulan-Burgasy, Khamar-Daban. And the Pre-Baikal region is the upturned outskirts of the foundation of the Siberian platform, the medium-high Baikal and low Primorsky ridges, cut through by the source of the Angara (now the Irkutsk reservoir has flowed here). Phlogopite mica is mined near Slyudyanka, near the southwestern corner of Lake Baikal. Graphite occurs in Khamar-Daban. There are also gold mines.

Warm springs flow along the faults, and resorts operate on some of them. On the eastern shore of Baikal, Goryachinsk is famous, in the Tunka Basin - Nilova Pustyn on radon waters and Arshan on sulfate-calcium-magnesium “Narzan”. Both of these resorts are decorated with a panorama of the Tunka mountains of the Eastern Sayan.

The Baikal-Amur Mainline reached the lake through a tunnel in the Baikal ridge. On the shore, it was necessary to dig through several “cape tunnels” similar to those laid on the Circum-Baikal Railway in the southwest of the lake. Both coastal routes are cut into spectacular cornices and allow you to admire Lake Baikal right from the train windows.

The climate of the Baikal region is influenced by the huge water mass of the lake, which warms the lake in winter and cools the coastal areas in summer. Near the shores in winter it is 6 - 10° warmer, and in summer it is 2 - 5° cooler than away from the lake. The seasons shift: the coldest month is February, the warmest is August; the long, harsh spring is much colder than autumn. Cold-resistant vegetation also descends to the cold waters - dwarf cedar forms a false sub-alpine belt near the shores.

The larch taiga is inferior to the mountain steppes of the forest-steppe only to the bottoms of the basins, the Baikal island of Olkhon and the neighboring section of the Primorsky Range. On wetter slopes the taiga is dark coniferous. Back in 1916, initially to protect the large and dark-haired Barguzin sable, the Barguzinsky Nature Reserve was organized on the slope of the ridge of the same name. Now the landscape as a whole is protected here.

In 1969, on an area of over one and a half thousand square kilometers on the northern slope of Khamar-Daban, another reserve was created, named Baikal for the sake of prestige, although it does not go to the shore. Its task is to protect the Khamar-Daban taiga with areas of the Dauro-Mongolian steppes in the sun.

The preservation of the Selenga delta, a unique bird kingdom, is ripe. It is planned to create a natural national Baikal Park with several branches on different shores of the lake. It is especially important to organize the protection of the Baikal landscape in places where the BAM route exits to the lake.

Baikal- the “glorious sea” of Russian songs, one of the unique wonders of the planet. “How it matches Siberia itself,” wrote Tvardovsky. A creation of nature, described and sung in thousands of texts no less than the Volga and Dnieper and yet not easy to depict. On small-scale maps it looks like a narrow gap; its basin is sometimes considered a deep trench, a steep-sided ditch. However, on the ground, the width of the reservoir (24 - 79 kilometers) is so significant compared to the mere kilometer heights of the sides of the depression that the lake looks more like a dish, and the coastal ridges seem to be lowered due to the proximity to the vast water perspective.

Wind revelry of brisk swells,

The distance leading under the sky...

Coastal ridges are low, stooped

Before the expanse of solemn waters.

The lake extends 636 kilometers in length. And the area of the mirror exceeds 30 thousand square kilometers. This is the deepest lake in the world. Comparing the depth of its bottom (1620) and the surface elevation (456 meters), we understand that the bottom drops to 1164 meters below the level of the World Ocean - such land depressions hidden under water are called cryptodepression; Baikal is the most amazing of them.

The volume of the depression is enormous - 23 thousand cubic kilometers, this is a fifth of the fresh water of the entire planet. The entire Baltic Sea holds the same amount of water with an incomparably larger area. Water from Baikal alone could fill the depressions of 23 Aral or 92 Azov seas. The outflow is carried out by one Angara, which removes 2 thousand cubic meters of water from the lake every second.

Baikal has many unique things: the tectonics of the lake bath, crystal clear water, and the museum-like preservation of hundreds of species of ancient animals. And the beauty of the lake? Now even astronauts admire it from the orbits of their flights! When the sun is calm, its surface is azure, but in other weather conditions it looks steel-gray. Let us recall the thunderous power of the storm surf and the stubborn winds. Then a gloomy storm blows in from the southwest kultuk, then from the north - overpowering other winds Verkhovik, aka hangar, then the shaft blowing from the northeast “stirs” Barguzin, and from directions close to the north-west, autumn-winter harahaiha and furious chilling sarma.

Today's contours of the Baikal bath are tectonically young (only Quaternary in age) and bear traces of the rocking of the shores themselves. They changed and shifted, but a gigantic volume of water existed constantly, at least since the Paleogene. That is why the fauna of the lake is so uniquely original. More than three-quarters of the species found here are found nowhere else in the world. Entire genera of organisms and even some families are endemic - Baikal gobies, golomyankas, 230 species of amphipods (out of 380 known on the globe), some mollusks. A seal has taken root in the fresh waters, apparently penetrating here from the northern seas during the cold snap during glacial times. It is possible that omul, one of the best commercial fish, also came to Baikal at the same time. Now omul fishing is limited, and at times it is even stopped. However, there is all the data to increase the productivity of fisheries so that Baikal could become the “fish and delicacy” workshop of the country.

In January the lake freezes over. Before the construction of the Circum-Baikal Railway, rails were laid on the ice in the second half of winter: an “ice link” was connected to the open Trans-Siberian Railway.

The cast iron rolled on rails on the ice -

Exactly, unshakably... But sometimes

Artillery salvoes echo

The water proclaimed its right.

The broken ice, tilting, hummocked

From the tension of the swaying depths!

Indeed, both thermal and seismic causes lead to ice cracking. And above the outlets of bottom gases there are ice holes that do not freeze at all.

Baikal is a regulator of the Angara flow created by nature itself, invaluable for maintaining the uniformity of its regime. But the Irkutsk hydroelectric power station dammed the source of the river and raised the level of the entire lake by more than a meter. It seemed that the meter difference did not exceed its seasonal fluctuations, but this also damaged Baikal: coastal roads had to be strengthened; complex bioconnections were disrupted - the planktonic small fry epishura and copepods were affected, and both omul and yellowwing goby fed on them; yellowfly fry were eaten by the same omul. As the level rose, the coastal water became cloudy, the gobies lost food and their usual spawning grounds, their numbers fell, and this affected the omul population.

How carefully you need to handle the lake in the future! A broad movement in its defense arose with the construction of two pulp mills off the coast. The economic justification for their appearance was not complete enough - at the turn of 1950 - 1960, the importance of concerns about environmental protection was still underestimated, and the ecological-economic approach was just beginning to take shape. It was necessary to create expensive treatment facilities; The Selenga Cardboard Mill is already promising to bring its industrial wastewater to complete purity. All slopes facing Lake Baikal have been declared a water protection zone, industrial logging on them has been stopped, as has rafting along the rivers flowing into the lake. However, the purity of water can also be damaged by distant cuttings - in the Selenga and Barguzin basins, and most importantly, by industrial wastewater from distant enterprises, for example, from Ulan-Ude.

The struggle to prevent damage to Lake Baikal inspired bright speeches by many writers and prominent scientists. Various projects to help the lake were discussed. Thus, it was proposed to build a “poison drain” from Lake Baikal to the Irkutsk basin. In 1969 and 1971, maintaining the dignity of Lake Baikal became the subject of special government and party-government decisions. Full use of the health and aesthetic benefits of the pool is provided.

The lake attracts nature lovers from the farthest corners of the country, and foreign guests are not uncommon on its shores. It is difficult to list all the temptations that attract you here. Of course, what is truly enchanting here is the expanse of the sea and the power of the water element, and the marvelous shades of crystal-clear water, and the gloomy mountain-taiga, and in some places, mountain-steppe frame. But this, so to speak, is the general background that is present everywhere on Lake Baikal. And there are so many individual amazing corners along its more than a thousand-kilometer coastline, and each of them has its own unique charm, be it the exotic Shamansky Stone at the source of the Angara or the Shamansky Cape at the southwestern tip of the lake...

The eastern shores of the Chivyrkuisky Bay and the mountainous Svyatoy Nos Peninsula are incredibly spectacular (if not for the low isthmus, this protrusion of land could easily be mistaken for a large isolated island to match Olkhon). The nature of the northwestern “bear” shore of the lake is still little affected, but the access of the BAM section here makes measures to protect this coast especially urgent - it is proposed to organize a nature reserve here. Another area where the regime of a natural national park is planned is Peschanaya Bay, famous among tourists, bounded by the Bolshaya and Malaya Kolokolny cliffs.

The clear eye of Siberia, the pride of our country, Baikal must remain unsullied, and this purity is more valuable to us than any opportunistic benefits. Let us turn once again to Tvardovsky and say after him:

“Baikal is a priceless gift of nature -

May he be eternal on Earth!”

Sayano-Tuva Plateau remained for a long time in the shadow of the loud glory of its neighbors - Baikal and Altai. The only reminders of the mountains were the frantic summer floods of the left tributaries of the Angara, which devastated the fields of the Sayan region. Only tourists over the past decades have become addicted to the Sayan Mountains, especially to “waterfall slalom” - rafting through rapids along mountain rivers. Now the Sayan Mountains have gained worldwide fame due to the construction of the largest Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station in the Yenisei gorge.

Together with the Prikosogol Mountains, which extend into Mongolia, the highlands stretch from east to west for a thousand kilometers and 600 from north to south. In addition to the Sayans, it includes Tuvan basins and several other mountain uplifts, with which these basins are framed or separated. The ancient Paleozoic structures of the subsoil were cracked and raised by the latest movements, along with the highly “upturned” edge of the Siberian Platform. And the relief is still young even with the age of its subsoil. But in the form of ridge plateaus in the east, the surfaces of the ancient alignment still survived from the erosion - Saramy. The Western Sayan, eroded by tributaries of the Yenisei to the level of its deeply incised channel, is divided into a particularly complex network of ridges. Gentle, medium-height ridges and plateaus with their long-lasting snow and white carpets of moss lichen are called Belogorya. Less common are ridges jagged in an alpine manner. The last of the ancients, and in some places also the modern glaciation, worked on this. The eternally snowy peaks of the Sayans, in contrast to the Belogoris, are called protein A mi. The preservation of many plateaus was helped by the basalt lava covers that armored them. Quite recently active volcanoes are also known; earthquakes happen.

The mineral resources of the highlands are enormous. More than 10 billion tons of coal lie in the Tuva Basin - the Ulughem Basin. At the western end of the Eastern Sayan, near Artemovsk, more than 200 million tons of iron ore have been explored. There are significant reserves of titanomagnetite and ferruginous quartzites, and dozens of ore occurrences of copper and many other metals are known. In the Tuvan part of the highlands, cinnabar is being mined. Cobalt production from ore at Hovu Aksy, in the foothills of the Tannu-Ola ranges, is one of the largest in the country. Aluminum raw materials are available; there are gold mines - near Artemovsk and in Tuva.

There are also known values among non-metallic minerals - asbestos, graphite, jade, and phosphorites. Reserves of pure chrysotilesbestos in the Eastern Sayan Ilchir, exceeding 4.5 million tons, have pushed this deposit to second place in the country. Botogol flake graphite is considered one of the best in the world - the Alibera concession has been developing it since the mid-19th century. Sayan jade competes in the beauty of shades and patterns with the best examples from the world-famous deposits of India and China.

Sayano-Tuva fragment of the mountains of Southern Siberia

The Eastern Sayan is the edge of the Precambrian platform basement involved in the South Siberian uplifts. In the southeast, two Alpine-style jagged ridges rise 3000 meters above the Tunka Basin - the Tunka and Kitoi Squirrels; their spectacular mountain chains have earned the name “Sayan Alps”. The foot of the Tunkinsky squirrels is cut off, as if on a ruler, by the youngest reverse fault; the freshness of the rift is such that it seems to be moving right before our eyes. Above the western head of the Tunka Basin rose the highest part of the Sayans, bordering Mongolia, headed by Munku-Sardyk (3492 meters). Adjoining it is the Oka Plateau - “Sayan Tibet”. Tongues of ancient lava slid down from basalt plateaus in some valleys. There are low volcanic cones in the Oka basin. The Eastern Sayan is so much lower and drier than the neighboring Altai that there are only 17 modern glaciers here, and their area is only 8 square kilometers.

A fifth of the area of the Eastern Sayan is occupied by mountain tundra and stone ruins. The taiga in the east with little snow is pine-larch, in the west, where snowfall is heavier, it is black. In the southern sunshine it alternates with steppe uburami. New life was brought into the valleys by the Taishet-Abakan pass railway, the eastern link of Yuzhsib, laid through tunnels and rock excavations.

In the northwest, the structures of the Eastern Sayan are subsiding.

On the shores of the Yenisei, erosion separated ancient magmatic massifs from these structures, forming the already mentioned “wonder of nature” - the Krasnoyarsk Pillars. The stone giants, along with the surrounding mountain-taiga landscape over an area of about 50 square kilometers, are protected in the reserve of the same name.

Feathers... Fortress... Grandfather... Great-grandfather... Vulture... Golden Eagles... Cain... Just by the names of the cliffs one can judge the fabulous pretentiousness of these natural sculptures. But they're not just spectacular. Stolby is a school of excellence for rock climbers; it was from here that the famous mountain climbers, the Abalakov brothers, began their journey to the peaks...

Tuva basins occupied by free rolling hilly plains, which, during the uplift of the highlands, remained at levels of 550 - 1200 meters. The northernmost of them, Todzhinskaya, is the least Tuvan in appearance; its bottom is not dry-steppe, but bog-pine with a magnificent constellation of ancient glacial lakes. The Eastern Sayan fences Todzha from the east; it lies, as it were, in a dead-end pocket for westerly winds and receives up to 400 millimeters of moisture per year. There are extensive cedar forests on its slopes. In the Akademik Obruchev Mountains there are harsh plateaus armored with young basalts and cut by canyons of the Yenisei sources.

Actually, the Tuva, or Ulughem, basin stretches for more than 300 kilometers. At the confluence of the rafting sources of the Yenisei, the Small and the Bolshoi, the capital of Tuva is located - the city of Kyzyl - with an obelisk denoting the “center of Asia”. From here the navigable Upper Yenisei - Ulug-Khem - rushes towards its breakthrough through the Western Sayan. The upper reaches of the Sayano-Shushenskoye reservoir penetrated 75 kilometers into the western part of the basin, so that now the shortened Upper Yenisei flows into it.

In the middle and southern basins of Tuva there is an acute continental climate with a huge range of extreme temperatures (heat, despite the elevation, up to 40°, frosts up to minus 58°). Precipitation falls only 180-300 millimeters per year. There is so little snow that it is possible to keep livestock grazing in winter, but in summer dry-steppe pastures need watering, and fields need artificial irrigation. Many rivers freeze to the bottom. When water breaks through, ice freezes to match the Kolyma ice.

To the south of the basins passes one of the main watersheds of Eurasia. The flow to the north of here goes to the Arctic Ocean, and to the south - to the drainage-free regions of Central Asia. It's an intermittent circuit South Tuva Mountains- a convex arc to the north from Prikosogolye to Altai. It also has high-mountain sections with Alpine jagged ridges about 3-4 kilometers high. Here, many Siberian aspects of nature are replaced by Central Asian ones: on the shady slopes the taiga and animals are Siberian, and on the sunny slopes there are purely Mongolian steppes that do not penetrate to the north. The reindeer's neighbor here turns out to be an antelope - the gazelle.

To the south of this barrier extends the edge extending far beyond the border Great Western Mongolian Lakes. The Soviet Union owns the narrow periphery of the plain, inclined towards one of the largest lakes in the region - the border lake Uvs-Nur. The height of its mirror is 759 meters. Everything here is Central Asian: dry climate (less than 100 millimeters of precipitation per year), dust storms, scarce rivers lost in the sands, a typically Mongolian spectrum of fauna with its rodents and lizards, camel breeding.

Western Sayan, perpendicular to the Eastern, below it; the heights of the main ridges here are 2500 - 2900 meters, Bai-Taiga is raised to 3129 meters. The network of valleys is denser, they themselves are deeper, and there are fewer surviving plateaus. Alpine teeth are present only on isolated ridges, and there are no modern glaciers. The already mentioned through gorge, through which the Yenisei broke through from the Tuva basin to the Minusinsk basin, is flooded by a reservoir.

The taiga mountains have long been crossed by the Usinsk tract, which connected the Minusinsk Basin with Tuva through passes more than a kilometer high. Now there is a second pass route - from the Abakan plant (Abaza) at the southwestern exit from the Minusinsk Basin to the western Tuvan city of Ak-Dovurak (white clay) - the center of the extraction of “white wool” - asbestos. Both paths are worth each other in terms of the attractiveness of nature. Usinsky is especially popular - among tourists it is considered one of the most beautiful roads in the whole country. From the sultry Minusinsk steppe with its melons, brackish lakes and mirages you find yourself in the wilderness of mountain taiga gorges, and on the pass over the Kulumys ridge you gasp at the unfolding panorama of the cold and wild peaks of Ergaki. In their outlines one can recognize the silhouette of a hero - the “Sleeping Sayan”. Further, the path leads along the fertile honey-bearing valley of the Us River, which gave the name to the tract. The taiga gives way to mountain forest-steppe, and beyond the Merry Pass through the Kurtushibinsky ridge lie the mountain-steppe basins of Tuva...

The nature of the left-bank slopes adjacent to the Yenisei Pipe is protected in the huge (slightly less than 4 thousand square kilometers) Sayano-Shushensky Nature Reserve. The true beauty and grandeur of the highlands will be more fully realized with the organization of natural national parks (the first of which is planned to be the Todzha Park). The mighty Sayan territorial-production complex, powered by the heroic energy of the giantesses of hydroelectric power stations, will allow large cities to grow here.

IN Kuznetsk-Minusinsk region forest-steppe and steppe plains with black soils stretched out, occupying the bottoms of vast basins. They separate three stripes of mountains, among which the axial one is the mid-altitude Kuznetsk Alatau. They lagged behind the neighboring units of the South Siberian mountains and were involved in a common uplift with them later than the Sayans and Altai - only in Quaternary time, although the subsoil here was crushed already in the early Paleozoic.

The heart of the region is the industrial landscape of Kuzbass with a dense population and a powerful pressure of man-made influences on nature. The basis of this industry is gigantic reserves of coal. The iron ores of Gornaya Shoria are important, as well as other mineralization - with veins and placers of precious metals, rare, non-ferrous and base metals, deposits of bauxite and nepheline are known.

The western slopes of the mountains receive 600-800, and in some places up to 1500 millimeters of precipitation per year - there is black taiga. The eastern slopes, even though they lie in the rain shadow, get 400-500 millimeters each - there are more park pine forests and foliage trees. In the frequent clearings there is a delight with large grasses, the lushness of which is not inferior to the subalpine meadows of neighboring Altai. In basins, precipitation decreases to 240-380 millimeters. More than a third of them fall in winter, and snow prevents the soil from freezing deeply. Western winds come to the basins, passing over the mountains, that is, in a downward flow, which further dries out the climate. In the spring, these “snow-eating” hair dryers evaporate the thin snow cover before our eyes, depriving the field of moisture, and then the permafrost becomes stronger.

Between the Sayans and Kuznetsk Alatau there is a strip of steppe basins drained by the Yenisei, Abakan and Chulym stretching for more than 350 kilometers. In the south there is the vast Minusinsk basin, to the north there are the Sydo-Erbinsk and Chulym-Yenisei basins. Their bottom is cut by rivers up to 170-280 meters. There are even salt lakes that have no outflow. The basins are separated by low mountains and asymmetrical ridges 800-900 meters high. As the bottom of the basins rises towards the Sayan Mountains, the moisture increases to almost 500 millimeters, and the birch-aspen forest-steppe comes into its own. In Permian times, the Minusinsk coal basin emerged, containing more than 37 billion tons of coal. The center of its production is Chernogorsk near Abakan. The Balakhta lignite basin in the Chulym-Yenisei basin is associated with Jurassic dives. The South Yenisei (Abakan-Minusinsk) industrial complex has a great future.

Kuznetsk Alatau in the Tegir-Tyz ridge (or Tegir-Tysh, “heavenly teeth”) reaches a height of 2178 meters - the Upper Tooth peak crowned with the collapse of stone blocks. A complex network of valleys divided the surface into rounded massifs - taskyly, in some places the Mesozoic weathering crust has survived and ancient glacial cirques are found.

Over 60 million tons of “Abakan Grace” iron ores have been mined since the mid-19th century. The abbreviated name of the then Abakan plant - Abaza - became the name of the modern city and mines supplying the metallurgy of Kuzbass. Nearby are the Tey iron ore mines with reserves of more than 130 million tons. The young mining settlement in the upper reaches of the Tei River is named Tei Top. The Batenovsky Ridge is adjacent to deposits of molybdenum ores, developed for the Sorsk plant, and copper and molybdenum deposits at the Tuim mine. There is ore gold. The northeastern foothills are also gold-bearing and metal-bearing. The resources of raw materials for the production of alumina and aluminum are economically precious in Goryachegorsk and Belogorsk, where the nephelines of the Kiya-Shaltyr deposit have earned especially great fame.

The mountains rose so recently that pockets of ancient flora remain on their slopes to this day. In them, representatives of broad-leaved forests survived from pre-glacial and interglacial landscapes. The “island” of the Siberian linden looks exotic in harsh Siberia.

The Kuznetsk Basin is a section of the earth’s crust 340 kilometers long and up to 110 kilometers wide, which is far behind the structures that rose in the neighborhood (the heights here are 150-450 meters). The basin inherited the tendency to lag from ancient times - its long-term subsidence, reaching 10 kilometers, led to the accumulation of coal-bearing strata in the Paleozoic and Jurassic. The Kuznetsk Basin, the richest in our country in terms of reserves of high-quality coal, occupies almost the entire basin. Up to a depth of 1800 meters, more than 900 billion tons have been accounted for, but production is still occurring from less than 200 meters depth and even from the surface. The abundance of coal dust, which helps condensate moisture, contributes to the frequency and density of fogs.

The Tom, which drains the basin to the Ob, must supply water to the gigantic Kuzbass, which “drinks” up to 1 million cubic meters of water every day and returns only part of it to the river. There is nowhere to transfer water here; you need to learn how to control Tomya herself. On one of the thresholds there is a dam of the Krapivinsky hydroelectric complex with a hydroelectric power station of 300 thousand kilowatts. The 670 square kilometer reservoir intercepts and smoothes out seasonal flow peaks. A wonderful recreation area for Kuzbass miners is emerging off the coast.

The basin is occupied by larch-birch forest-steppe, the steppe areas are cultivated for grain, potatoes and vegetables. After open-pit coal mining, a “lunar landscape” remains. Quarry excavations and dumps of overburden rock and slag stretching for many kilometers reduce even the areas suitable for settlement. Reclamation is also being solved here as a social problem.

The southern head of the basin is occupied by the mid-altitude ridges of Gornaya Shoria - spurs of the Biyskaya Griva ridge, connecting Altai with Salair. Gold is mined here and easily enriched magnetite iron ores are developed, the reserves of which reach 750 million tons and make it possible to profitably use them for Kuznetsk metallurgy.

The Salair Ridge is an asymmetrical hill stretching over 300 kilometers with black taiga on the gently undulating southwestern slope and birch forest-steppe on the steeper eastern slope. His ledge - Tyrgan- rises a hundred meters above the Kuznetsk Basin, but the absolute heights do not exceed half a kilometer. The stone folds of Salair are exposed in isolated ledges and ridges among a thick cloak of loess-like loams. The tip of the ridge approaches the suburbs of Novosibirsk. At the end of the 18th century, the development and smelting of Salair polymetallic ores and silver was underway. Now the city of Salair has become the center of their production.

To the southwest of the foot of Salair, in the associated submerged structures over a vast area, 6 billion tons of Lower Permian coals from the Gorlovka basin lie with the production center in Listvyansky.

Altai- the world of the highest mountains not only in Southern, but throughout Siberia. Nowhere are the expanses of its mountain taiga, pitted with honeydews, crowned with such a layer of diamond snowy peaks as here. All indicators of the greatness and richness of South Siberian nature reach the highest values. It is not for nothing that the artist Nicholas Roerich considered Altai the pearl of Siberia and all of Asia, wrote that here “the mountains are beautiful, and the mineral resources are powerful, and the rivers are fast, and the flowers are unprecedented,” he admired the country full of “beautiful forests, thundering rivers and snow-white ridges."

Altai is the westernmost of the South Siberian mountain systems, and therefore the most humid: from 1 to 2 thousand millimeters of precipitation falls on the outer slopes per year. Here is the richest taiga in all of Siberia, the most lush meadows, and therefore mountain pastures - they occupy up to one fifth of the area of Altai. Streams fed by glaciers sparkle with waterfalls, bubble in rocky gorges - bomah, give birth to mighty rivers, the main ones being the Katun and Biya, which make up the great Ob. The southwestern foothills are cut through by the Irtysh, in the valley of which man-made seas spill out. The subsoil treasures, especially ore ones, will not be inferior to the rest of South Siberia. In a word, this is an amazing region, deservedly appreciated by miners and metallurgists, power engineers and cattle breeders, tourists and climbers...

The maze of ridges and valleys can seem chaotic. But it was here that Academician Obruchev discerned a harmonious order, which even allowed him to identify the newest stage in the development of relief - neotectonic. The surface of Rudny Altai turned out to be like a training model, proving the significance of recent movements for the relief of mountainous countries. Some of the irregularities, mostly minor ones, are carved out by erosion from ancient, still Paleozoic folds, extending from southeast to northwest. And the newest corrugation, which was accompanied by faults, crossed the ancient folds obliquely, so that the main neotectonic swells, and with them large ridges, stretched from west to east.

Altai

Thus, the southern rampart stretches from the border ridge of Tabyn-Bogdo-Ola to the middle mountains of the Narym ridge. This shaft is separated from the rest of Altai by a young longitudinal valley, in which are located the valleys of the upper Bukhtarma, Narym and part of the valley of the Irtysh itself, now flooded by the bay of the reservoir. Another shaft stretched north of this valley - from the eastern half of the border Sailyugem through the Listvyagu ridge to the Trans-Irtysh Kalbinsky Mountains. The neighboring, even more northern rampart is crowned with high mountain ranges - the Chuysky and Katunsky (they are often called the Chuysky and Katunsky Alps). Katunsky is headed by the peak of Altai - the beautiful Belukha, its height is 4506 meters. Ancient plateaus and flat-bottomed depressions, such as Ukok and the Chui steppe, apparently survived not without protection from the ancient ice caps that overlapped them.

It is no coincidence that many basins are called “steppes”. They are so closed that they receive ten times less moisture than the mountains: only 200-300, and the Chui steppe - 100 millimeters per year. Therefore, mountain-steppe landscapes of the Central Asian type penetrate here, where “Central Asian” animals also thrive. A mighty mountain taiga stretches over the steppes and mountain forest-steppe of the foothills: in the north - up to 400-1500 meters, in the south - up to 1700-2400 meters. Its fauna includes typical northern Siberians.

The dark coniferous mountain taiga is formed by Siberian cedars, spruces and firs, black- fir and aspen. Dark coniferous taiga is characteristic only of the north (pure fir taiga is characteristic of the humid west). On the northwestern foothills, forests of pine and larch are common, and on the ridge parts of the Kalbinsky Mountains - pine forests. To the south, the mountain-taiga northern slopes alternate with the mountain-steppe southern slopes, forming a mountain forest-steppe. And in the depths of the mountains, as the climate dries out, dark coniferous forests are replaced by light-colored and sparse forests of Siberian larch.

When, having passed the taiga slopes, you come out to the upper border of the forest, you are amazed at the open space. In terms of the richness and beauty of mountain meadows, Altai competes with the Greater Caucasus, and in the gigantism of subalpine grasses - with the “grass forests” of the Far East. The green foliage is formed by leuzea (maral root), hogweed, bright pink peonies, Altai flame, delphinium are colorful... Interspersed with herbs are groves of twisted birch trees and willow trees.

Carpets of low-grass alpine are striking in the large size of their corollas and inflorescences. Sometimes the greenery even retreats before the blue of the constantly blooming aquilegias - catchments, but this background is also dotted with the lights of swimsuits, wild-growing pansies of Altai violets, crayfish necks of the knotweed, the cube-blue starry glasses of gentians - gentians, the golden yellowness of Altai poppies, the whiteness of anemones - anemones, pink primroses - primroses, pale lilac asters.

In the mountain meadows, descending into the forests in winter, musk deer and Siberian roe deer, and the mountain goat - tauteke, graze. Altai marmots and hay pikas are very typical of mountain meadows.

Mountain tundras stretch over the meadows and rocky snow-glacier heights rise - this is the kingdom of mountain goats, even reindeer wander here, and both are notaway to feast on the snow leopard and red wolf. Notable in the bird world are the Altai snowcock (mountain turkey), the Alpine chough, the chough, the white and tundra partridge, and the carrion-eating bearded vulture.

Back in 1932, the Altai Nature Reserve was established. On an area of over 8.5 thousand square kilometers from Lake Teletskoye to the crest of the Abakan Range, the landscape of all altitude zones, including mountain steppes, is protected. The heroic larches are especially powerful here. Reserved forests are good in the spring, when they are filled with aroma and white tassels of bird cherry from below, and the undergrowth rhododendron with pink flowers, and especially in the fall, when the trees in the lower tier light up with different colors.

The pearl of nature of the reserve, and of the entire Altai, is Lake Teletskoye. The heavy green expanse of its mirror lies at an altitude of 436 meters above sea level and occupies 223 square kilometers. The lake is oblong - 77 kilometers long and up to 30 kilometers wide. It resembles a flooded valley, but by no means just a river valley. Recent tectonics have deepened the bath to 325 meters compared to the level of the underlying upper reaches of the Biya. The sculptors of the basin were both the force of erosion and ancient glacial “cosmetics” with smoothing of rocks and boulder accumulations.

Only the right bank is protected, which means it is closed to tourists. There is a need to streamline the use of the left bank - it will be covered by a natural national park.

Altai has another lake eye - Marka-Kol. The blue surface, measuring almost 450 square kilometers, rests a kilometer higher than that of Teletsky. Either larch taiga or steppes approach the shores. The river Kaldzhir, or Chumek, flows from it into the Irtysh - these names are translated as “key” and “faucet”. Along Kaldzhir, grayling, minnow, lenok - salmon, locally called uskuk, rose into the lake. In the spring, schools of Uskuch, bursting to spawn, literally dam the streams. A nature reserve has been organized here since 1976.

In the past, Altai became more glaciated than the Sayan Mountains and Transbaikalia. At one time, glaciers covered the plateaus with caps of ice, as now in Scandinavia, and valley glaciers crawled out of the mountains onto the plains, as in Alaska. The glacier that lay along Bukhtarma stretched for 350 kilometers, almost four times larger than the current Pamir Fedchenko. At the last stage, glaciation covered only the upper reaches of the valleys and the ridge parts of the ridges. It was at this time that the entire ensemble of alpine beauties took shape in Altai - serrated ridges, circuses, shining lakes... Glaciation is still impressive today: almost 800 glaciers slide down from the ridges. Its total area at the end of the 19th century exceeded 600 square kilometers, but then decreased noticeably. The snow line in the wet west drops below 2.5, and in the dry southeast it rises to 3.5 kilometers.

The subsoil of Altai is ore-bearing. This was due to the intrusion of granite magma in the Paleozoic and hot solutions penetrating into cracks from its sources. The southwest is especially rich in ores, which is even reflected in the name of the mountains. Rudny Altai, with its famous Irtysh shear zone and a strip of thick granites in the Kalba Mountains, consists of several ore belts. In one of them, polymetal ores predominate, in the other - copper, in the third - rare metals. There is also a gold-bearing belt. And ores have many useful impurities with dozens of other metals. It is estimated that each ton of Altai ores is 3-4 times more valuable than in other ore regions of the country. The Leninogorsk and Zyryanovsk lead-zinc deposits are especially important. The first ones were discovered back in 1786 by mining engineer Philip Ridder and have been producing products for almost two centuries. The revival of polymetal mining in Rudny Altai is associated with the initiative of V.I. Lenin. This served as the basis for renaming the city of Ridder to Leninogorsk in 1941. Today Rudny Altai is the main supplier of non-ferrous metals to the entire country, providing it with 40% of lead and 60% of zinc.

Even earlier, a cluster of copper and polymetallic deposits was discovered and developed in the northwestern foothills of Altai - near Kolyvan and Zmeinogorsk. With the depletion of copper ores, Kolyvan switched to gems, and near Zmeinogorsk and Gornyak the extraction of polymetals continues. Over half a billion tons of magnetites have been explored southeast of Kolyvan.

Along the faults there are healing warm springs, the base of attractive resorts. Particularly famous are the radon Belokurikha in the northern foothills and the Rakhmanovsky springs at the southern foot of Belukha. Near Belokurikha and Kolyvan there are remarkable fantastic granite outcrops; they resemble either the figures of unknown monsters or the ruins of ancient castles.

At the threshold of Altai, the Biya and Katun merge. Each of them bears the memory of its mountain past: Biya that the mud of mountain sources was left by her in Lake Teletskoye, and Katun - how mountain snows and glaciers watered it and there was not a single lake along the way where the mud of their melt waters could be had to stand. It has long been noticed, and now it can be seen from an airplane, that both rivers below their confluence do not mix water for a long time and flow in two parallel streams - the stream of the Biya, dark with the transparent purity of its waters, and the brownish-turbid stream of the Katun.

Lake Teletskoye is not only a sedimentation basin, but also a regulator of the flow of the Biya - nature itself suggested the creation of a cascade of hydroelectric power stations on it. A ladder of six dams and stations will appear on the Katun; one of the stages, Elandinskaya, is already in the project. Then the Katun will carry settled waters to merge with the Biya, and we will no longer be able to distinguish their stream into the Ob by the hue. And the regulated young Ob, during the seasons of greatest need for irrigation, will be able to give part of the water to the neighboring Kulunda steppes.

Nature has been enriched with incredible beauty as a result of the creation of powerful hydroelectric power stations on the southwestern outskirts of Altai - the Irtysh. There are light azure reservoirs dammed here with winding mountainous banks. The dam of the Ust-Kamenogorsk hydroelectric power station blocked the path of the Irtysh just at its exit from the “mouth of the stone mountains” narrowed to 400 meters into the flat bell of the valley. At this gate of Rudny Altai there was a dam 50 meters high with a unique single-chamber sluice. The valley, constrained by steep slopes, is flooded up to 85 kilometers in an area of only 37 square kilometers, and the volume here is modest - only 1 cubic kilometer of water. It copes with daily flow regulation.

Influencing longer rhythms is the task of the overlying Bukhtarma dam. It raised the river level by 94 meters, allowing 675 thousand kilowatts to be generated here, and flooded not only its through valley along with the mouth of the Bukhtarma valley, but also the wide longitudinal bend of the Irtysh valley, forming a separate Bolshenarym “sea”. Moreover, even the huge Lake Zaisan was flooded by the backwater (its mirror was located at an altitude of 386 meters and was up to a hundred kilometers long and up to 30 kilometers wide). Raising the lake level by 7 meters expanded it to 40 and lengthened it to 160 kilometers - in particular, it flooded the swampy delta of the Black Irtysh. The total area of the reservoir created by the backwater, including the “grown” lake, exceeded 5 thousand square kilometers. Some hydrologists now call the entire Zaisan part of the Bukhtarma reservoir, but this is unfair: we still consider Lake Baikal, dammed in a similar way by a meter.

The water of the Irtysh is greedily drunk by the arid regions of Inner Kazakhstan, and its reserves are limited. This, in particular, was influenced by the increase in water consumption of the Black Irtysh for irrigating fields in its foreign upper reaches. In dry years, it happens that the reserves of the Irtysh reservoirs are not enough even to power power plants. Then the Ekibastuz thermal power station acts as a donor - it provides energy to Rudno-Altai enterprises during periods when it is necessary to replenish reservoirs. They are also thinking about transferring water from the upper reaches of the Katun to the Irtysh through Bukhtarma and through tunnels in the Kholzun and Listvyaga ridges.

The valleys of Rudny Altai, dug by the tributaries of the Irtysh in tectonic trenches, abound in fertile lands. Some of them went under the level of reservoirs. More than 90 villages have been moved to new locations closer to the mountains. Altai is also famous for its sheep breeding. In some places, deer are bred for their healing antlers. Altai honey competes with the best honey in the country. The possibilities of commercial hunting are innumerable.

Railways have long penetrated the valleys of Rudny Altai; they do not yet exist in Gorny Altai. All the more important is its core highway - in the past it was not easy, laid with the help of cornice recesses in rocky bomah(gorges), and now the reconstructed Chuysky tract. The singer of Siberia, the writer Shishkov, took part in its construction as an explorer; a monument was erected to him in one of the clearings in the Katun Valley. Starting from Biysk, the road emerges onto the steep slopes above the Katun, and ahead a panorama of the mountain-forest expanse opens up - a sea of taiga covering the agitated swell of the mountains. The village of Srostki, located here, is the birthplace of the writer and cinematographer Shukshin, the scene of several of his films.

In the forested lowlands, the tract passes the Gorno-Altaisk basin and rises along a narrowing gorge. Up the Katun the road goes to the mountain-forest resort of Chemal and higher - to the site of the Elandinskaya hydroelectric power station and fragments of Oroktay marble. The road was built to bypass the overlying gorges by the mountains, from where it descends into a completely new world of mountain steppes with dark soils like black soil and crops of quickly ripening grains. Once again reaching the Katun, the tract goes up its tributary Chuya into higher basins - the Kurai and Chuya “steppes”. Chuyskaya is more of a semi-desert with patches of permafrost and saline meadows, and the herds of camels and yaks grazing on it indicate that Central Asia is nearby.

Many tourists walk along the Katun above the mouth of the Chuya - they are attracted by two magnets: Mount Belukha and the Uimon Basin. The slightly milky blue view of the Belukha snow-glacier massif across Lake Akkem is a world-class landscape masterpiece.

In 1926, Upper Uimon served as the base for the Altai expedition of the Roerich family - they studied both nature and antiquities here. Tourists climb the ridges from which the artist painted sketches of the “Lady of Altai” Belukha. He said that here are “the bluest, most sonorous mountains.”

Even then, the artist was fascinated by both the economic opportunities and the prospects for the development of the deep Altai, which was completely virgin in those days. He wrote:

“...Construction economy, untouched mineral resources...grasses taller than a horseman, forest, cattle breeding, thundering rivers calling for electrification - all this gives Altai an unforgettable significance!”

Fascinated by the nature of the Uimon Basin, Roerich dreamed that it was here that the cultural center of Altai would grow in the future with a railway from Barnaul (they tried to route it in the pre-revolutionary years). He even suggested a name suitable for the future city - another Zvenigorod - everything around looked so “clear, clean and ringing.”

Climbers assigned the name of Roerich to one of the snowy peaks of Altai, hoisting the banner of Roerich’s Peace Pact on it.

Also on topic

Sun Tzu's Wittest Aphorisms and Quotes

Review: “A Year Lived Biblically” by A. J. Jacobs References to Western Culture

Swedish secrets to a happy life"

Healthy aromatic rye buns without yeast Wheat rye buns in the oven

Can I eat oatmeal with banana?