What lies at the base of the Ural mountains. We study the Ural mountains on the map of Russia: full characteristics and geographical location

From the swampy tundras of the Arctic, completely covered with cloudberries, to the feather grass steppes of Kazakhstan, for more than 2500 kilometers across the vast plains covered with taiga, a grandiose natural stone structure stretches - the Ural Mountains. On the map or from a bird's eye view, you can see how they expand by the curtains of parallel ridges, then narrow to a "narrow" strip (only 30 km), sometimes they are almost lost among the hills overgrown with century-old trees, and suddenly they suddenly soar up in fantastic masses dotted with scattering domes over the taiga sea. The Ural ridge is a continuous series of various natural landscapes replacing each other.

Geography: Ural Mountains

It is customary to divide this stone massif with the adjacent territories into four parts: Polar, Subpolar, Middle and South Urals. Each of them has its own climatic conditions, its own vegetation, its own natural resources. If you look at the Ural Mountains on a map, you can see that they originate in the Arctic Ocean. The first peak is Konstantinov Kamen, its height is only 492 meters. This part of the mountain range is located on the territory of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug and the Komi Republic. The Subpolar Urals originates from the Sablya massif and then stretches along the meridian of 59 ° N. NS. It consists of two parallel ridges. The territory of the Subpolar Urals ends with a rather high peak (1569 m), which is called Konzhakovsky Kamen. The middle part of this monumental natural structure lies between 56 and 59 degrees north latitude. The geographical position of the Ural Mountains also changes here. The meridional strike is replaced by the south-southeast direction. The last, fourth, part of the Ural massif originates from Mount Yurma and extends to the southern end of the ridge is the widest and reaches about 200 kilometers.

Poetic digression

These gray mountain ridges, smoothed by winds and time, today can no longer impress with either the steepness or the height of the slopes, but their severe majesty fills the air with the scent of eternity. Here, the intermontane valleys are home to a huge variety of crystal-clear springs and lakes of wonderful turquoise shades. From ancient peaks, emerald streams begin their distant run to large lakes and rivers - Pechora, Ob, Kama. The slopes are overgrown with bushes and trees, which, under the piercing wind, convulsively cling to the cracks in the dilapidated rocks with their roots - a delicate and fragile beauty opens up to the traveler's eyes. The remnants of the virgin forest huddle up to the stern and gloomy stone guards, as if asking them for protection from a man who brings death to the wild.

Natural characteristics of the Southern and Middle Urals

The nature of the southern part of the Ural ridge is soft and friendly. Mixed taiga covers the slopes. Cozy river valleys are inhabited by the Bashkir people, who gave their names to most of the hills and rivers. Including the top of Yaman-Tau, which means "bad mountain". This peak of the Ural Mountains is the highest (1640 m) in these places. The middle part is the lowest of the entire Stone Belt. The abundance of rivers, carrying their waters among the majestic cliffs, enliven the space of wooded parmas (hills), where individual peaks rise above the border of the forest, sadly overlooking the green sea below. Here, on the high ridges, you can find both mountain tundra and real

Harsh North

Moving further north, the stone wall begins to gain height, the mountains look more severe and gloomy. It becomes clear why the locals have called them that since ancient times. After all, the name "Ural" appeared quite recently, in the 18th century, with the light hand of Tatishchev. And the people have always called and continue to call these mountains the Stone, or the Stone Belt. Even most of the peaks of the Urals have retained the memory of this: Kosvinsky, Denezhkin, Konzhakovsky and many other stones. These giants reach the clouds, and the peaks are hidden behind a white curtain. From the description it is clear that the unique geographical position of the Ural Mountains has absorbed various climatic conditions and the beauty of virgin nature cannot be conveyed in words, it must be seen with one's own eyes.

If you go even further north, you can see the first Karas, snowfields and moraine ridges. Where the fast river Shchugor rushes to Pechora, the giant Telpoz-Iz, which means "nest of the winds", rose. This is the highest mountain of the Ural Mountains in this part of the Stone Belt, its height is 1617 m. It received its poetic name from the indigenous inhabitants - the Komi-Zyryan. The nest of winds stands out from the general mass with powerful rocky cliffs, strong winds and almost constantly hanging over the slopes and the first glaciers. In the 15th century, a path passed through the Urals along the Shchugor River, and this noticeable peak was a landmark for travelers. Russian chronicles eloquently called her the Pillar. In those days, it was mistakenly believed that this is the highest mountain in the Ural Mountains. Further to the north you can see Sablya peak (1497 m), it is clearly visible from the Pechora coast. In the middle of the 19th century, this peak also claimed the primacy. And only in the 20th century the disputes ended, and it was established for certain that both of them are giving way to the mountain called Narodnaya, discovered in 1927.

The highest peak of the Ural Mountains: the history of discovery

In 1924-1928. In the northern unexplored regions of the Urals, an expedition of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR was conducted under the leadership of B. Gorodkov. In June 1927, one of its detachments (led by geologist A. Aleshko) reached the upper reaches of the Naroda River. The expedition, while surveying the area, discovered a number of peaks that surpassed all previously known at that time in the Stone Belt. The highest point of the Ural Mountains was named Narodnaya in honor of the river near which it is located, and the tenth anniversary of the Soviet people (more on that below). In 1929 A. Aleshkov published the report of his expedition - "Northern Urals (Lyapinsky Territory)". This was the first publication that reported on the highest peak of the Ural ridge. In addition, the author spoke about its neighbors: Karpinsky (1780 m) and Didkovsky (1750 m) peaks. With their discovery, the disputes about the primacy among the mountain peaks of this region (Saber, Telpoz-Iz, etc.) were ended once and for all.

Folk or Folk?

What syllable should be stressed? Scientists have debated this issue for a long time. Some argued that the discoverer named it so in honor of the Soviet people. Their opponents argue that this highest mountain in the Ural Mountains takes its name from the Narada River, which flows at its foot. The people in translation from the Mansi language means "forest". It really originates in the forest. Meanwhile, scientists have figured out that they called her Poengurr. Now it is impossible to find reliable information about what the discoverer of the Aleshkov peak had in mind. In his notes, he did not put stress and did not explain anything on this score. So we will leave the controversy for scientists, and we ourselves will pay attention directly to this magnificent peak. The highest mountain of the Ural Mountains allows us to admire an indescribable panorama - the chaos of the mountains, a harsh, majestic and formidable land. Standing at the top of the peak, you understand that nothing has changed here, everything has remained the same as a hundred, two hundred or even a thousand years ago. Time stands still ...

Popular tourist route

This highest mountain of the Ural Mountains and its surroundings attracted the interest of fans of extreme types of recreation only at the end of the 50s of the last century. With the arrival of tourists here, the appearance of the mountain began to change. Various plaques and memorial signs appeared here. Tourists have a custom of leaving notes on top. And in 1998, the Orthodox Church installed a worship cross here, on which is written "Save and preserve." In 1999, Christians went even further, they organized a procession of the cross to the highest point of the Urals.

Description of Mount Narodnaya

The slopes of this majestic peak are covered with caras - these are natural bowl-shaped depressions filled with ice and clear water. In addition, there are many large boulders here. There are snowfields and glaciers. The relief in this part of the Stone Belt is mountainous, with deep gorges and sheer cliffs. Tourists must be very careful not to get hurt. Moreover, the nearest housing is very, very far away. You can climb Narodnaya Peak along the western ridge, but there are very rocky steep slopes and many pitches, which greatly complicates the ascent. It is easier to climb the northern slope - along the spurs of the mountain. And the eastern side of the peak consists entirely of sheer walls and gorges.

Equipment

You don't need climbing equipment to climb this peak. Nevertheless, to make a hike in a deserted mountainous area, you should have high-quality athletic form. And in case of insufficient tourist experience, it is best to use the services of an experienced guide. It should be borne in mind that the climate of the subpolar Urals is very harsh. Cold, changeable weather reigns here even in summer. It is believed that the most favorable period for a hike to this region is July and the first half of August. When getting ready for the journey, you should take into account that the hike will last at least a week. There is no accommodation here, you will have to spend the night only in tents. Geographically, Narodnaya Mountain belongs to the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug. If you are not limited in time, then you can visit another point - the peak of Managara. It is, of course, lower than Narodnaya, but it will be able to surprise you with its extraordinary beauty.

How to get to the top of Narodnaya?

First you need to get by rail to the Verkhnyaya Inta station (Komi Republic). Here at st. Dzerzhinsky, 27a is the office of the national park "Yugyd Va". Participants in the hike should register and obtain permission to visit the area. You need to know that the application is submitted in advance, 10 days before the trip. Having completed all the formalities, go to the bus station, from where you will get to the city of Inta. There is a hotel here where you can stay, as it will take some time before being thrown into the mountain area. For this you will need to order a car that will take you to the Zhelannaya industrial base near Lake Bolshoye Balbanty. And from here we walk 17 kilometers to the foot of the mountain along the Balbanu River. That's it, the ascent begins ...

How the Ural Mountains were born

The Urals on Earth are a unique phenomenon.

And in its role as a planetary seam that once held two great continents together.

And by the abundance of natural landscapes here, generously scattered throughout its space.

And in terms of climatic diversity.

Indeed, where else can you find such an edge, at which the headboard would be cooled by the age-old ice of the Northern Ocean, and the foot would be burned by the calcined sands of the deserts? The land, where on the same June day the unsetting sun shines over the blossoming polar tundra and the alpine meadows forbs spreads luxuriously. Where you can hunt to your heart's content in cedars or, after admiring the slender choirs of elegant birch pegs, stop at the Bashkir nomad camp, drink plenty of chilled kumis, while watching everything around vibrate in the sultry haze of the steppe ...

And now, from these poetic pictures of the Ural Territory, we will have to move on to more prosaic, but very necessary things for our story. It is interesting, I think, to understand for oneself - how did such an unusual natural creation appear on the planet's body, what forces erected it. Therefore, a small excursion into the science that studies the Earth, into geology, is inevitable.

What does modern science define by the concept of "Ural"?

Strictly speaking, the Urals is a mountainous country with two great plains adjacent to it from the west and east. Why geologists think so, we will discuss later. As mentioned earlier, the Ural mountainous country lies on the planet in a rather narrow strip, the width of which rarely exceeds one hundred and fifty kilometers, while it stretches from the Aral deserts to the Arctic Ocean for more than two and a half thousand kilometers. In this way, it resembles many mountain ranges known on Earth - the Andes, for example. Only the mountains in the Urals, although often rocky, are much lower, less steep, more ordinary, perhaps, than their illustrious counterparts somewhere in the Alps or the Himalayas.

But if the Ural Mountains outwardly do not amaze with anything, then the content of their bowels is completely unique.

The Urals are world famous for the richness and diversity of their geological structure. This is an irrefutable truth. But it is necessary to realize to the most subtle shade of significance of this fact - the Urals may be the only place on Earth where specialists have found rocks formed in almost all periods of the planet's existence. And minerals, the appearance of which could be due to the existence here (of course, at different times) of all conceivable physical and chemical regimes both in the bowels of the Earth and on its surface. Some kind of utter mishmash of uneven-aged and diverse geological formations!

But that's not all.

The abundant list of geological formations of the Urals naturally includes a uniquely wide range of the richest deposits of almost all minerals known on our planet. Oil and diamonds. Iron and jasper with marble. Gas and malachite. Bauxites and corundum. And ... and ... and ... The list is endless - not everything is still open, and we still know not all types of minerals.

All this - and the diversity that amazes the imagination of even sophisticated professionals, and the abundance of treasures of the subsoil, and their unprecedented age difference - all this has made the Urals a geological Mecca of the world community. It began from the time of Peter the Great - and has not ended to this day. "Everyone flashed before us, everyone visited here ..." Historians claim that the Russian Geological Committee, created by the tsarist command more than a hundred years ago, was basically established so that pundits would finally decide on this natural disaster, called the Urals ...

Only… only a huge number of studies did not simplify the solution of the problem, for the sake of which the academic luminaries came to the Urals. The tasks of understanding - how did it all come together here ?!

To enumerate all the hypotheses of the formation of the Urals created is not an exercise for a brief outline. An extensive monograph is needed here. After all, the inconsistency of a thousand times verified and rechecked observations has put together an incredible kaleidoscope of facts. Researchers had to logically link the obvious reality of finding literally a number of the most heterogeneous deposits. And now crumbling underfoot siliceous platy chips of formations of the ocean floor, which rained here three or four hundred million years ago. And boulder ridges brought into the depths of the ancient continent by glacial massifs hundreds of thousands of years ago. And outcrops of rocks of the granite or gabbro series, now destroyed by the winds and the sun, but which could have formed only at the depths of many kilometers of the earth, in the gloomy furnace of the thousand-degree temperatures and many-thousand atmospheric pressures reigning there. And sandy spits of river deposits that washed out here more than one million tons of sand and gravel from the crumbling mountains ...

So to this day, all this allows dozens of the most diverse assumptions about how the Earth lived in the Ural limits for its entire billion-year history on an equal footing. And to this day, decoding its true history is an urgent and most difficult problem for geologists.

True, today scientists have decided at least with the criterion by which they share the hypotheses of the formation of the Ural mountainous country.

This criterion is cosmogonic.

He finally made it possible to group all points of view in relation to the original matter of the planet Earth.

Proponents of one approach agree that all celestial bodies visible from the Earth - including the planets - were formed as a result of the convergence, compaction of the previously scattered cosmic proto-matter. It was either the same as the meteorites falling on our planet today, or it was a piece of fiery liquid melt. The philosopher Kant, the renowned mathematician and astronomer Laplace, and the outstanding Soviet researcher Otto Yul'evich Schmidt are among the creators of the hypotheses created on this premise. By the way, in Soviet schools, hypotheses from this series were mainly studied. And they are not so easy to challenge - meteorites continue to regularly pierce the Earth to this day, increasing its mass. And that to this day the earth's core is liquid, probably not a single geologist doubts. Yes, and the law of universal gravitation hitherto regularly determines the course of the luminaries and planets.

Proponents of another approach argue that all planets (the Earth, of course, is no exception for them) are debris from proto-matter, formed as a result of its explosive expansion, that is, there is, in their opinion, the process of decompaction of the substance of the Universe. The great Lomonosov did not deny such a view, it is now adhered to by many leading geologists and cosmologists of the world and our country ...

And their conviction is understandable. Astronomers have established: going to the Earth, the light from all visible stars is shifted to the red part of the spectrum. And there is only one satisfactory explanation for this - all the stars fly away from some center. This is a consequence of the decompaction of the substance of the cosmos.

According to the latest estimates, our planet has existed as a separate celestial body for about four and a half billion years. So: in the Urals, rocks have been found whose age is determined as not less than three billion. And the whole "tragedy" for the supporters of hypotheses is that this established fact is easily explained from the positions of both points of view ...

How did the Urals live from the birth of the planet to the present day? Naturally, two different paintings are also offered here. Supporters of the "shrinking" Earth believe that all this time the Urals behaved like an oscillating string (of course, a slowly oscillating and, of course, a huge string) - it either rose to the heavens, bristling with the rocky peaks of the mountains, then sank, bending towards the earth's center, and then - throughout the entire space of the depression - it was flooded with oceanic shafts. Naturally, these fluctuations were not so simple, consistent and unidirectional. During them, there were chips and ruptures of the earth's solid, and the crushing of its individual sections in the corrugation of the folds, and the formation of different depths of cracks. Water rushed from below and above into the gaping holes of the cracks, streams of incandescent lava erupted from the depths of the earth, and clouds of volcanic ash covered the sky and the sun, spewing out from the vents of fire-breathing volcanoes. There are many deposits of this kind in the Urals.

Globe by Martin Beheim (1492)

During the ascent of sections of the Urals, breakdowns of crushed stone, pebbles, sand are usually formed on them. During the subsidence, the rivers carried the destroyed material into the oceans and seas, filling their coastal zones with clays, silt, sand. Dying microorganisms created kilometer-long layers of limestone and other typically oceanic geological formations in the seas ...

And all these breeds are in abundance in the Urals, which, according to the supporters of the first approach, is quite enough to recognize it as true.

The proponents of the "separating" universe believe that the Earth was expanding in leaps and bounds. The picture of the formation of the Urals is drawn by him as follows. With the next significant expansion of the body of our planet, it shuddered, cracked, and huge continental blocks, broken by the expanding substance of the earth's interior, bursting them apart, slowly, like in an ice drift, crawled over the face of the planet. (By the way, it has been established that all the continents are still doing this, each moving in its own direction at a speed of up to several centimeters per year.) The space between the continents began to quickly fill with puffing gases, molten matter from deep bowels. From there, huge masses of salty waters of the future oceans and seas, which were formed during the same process of decompression, also splashed onto the earth's surface. So it was in the places of modern oceans.

The Ural was formed like this. Debris of ancient continents, dispersed from each other along the roundness of our planet, on the other hand, inevitably had to approach some other debris, too, from a previously whole piece of land. So the breakaway Europe and from somewhere the broken off Asia began to converge from something. In case of a collision, the edges of the converging debris began to crumble, crumple, and prick. Some pieces of approaching continents were squeezed out onto the surface of the Earth, some were crushed inward, crumpled into folds. From the gigantic pressures, something melted, something stratified, something completely changed its original appearance. Formed a monstrous jumble of the most diverse formations, which geologists inclined to humor have dubbed "the broken plate." The squeezed blocks of rocks formed along the line of contact of the materials of the chain of the Ural ridges.

The described, in the opinion of the authors of this idea, happened quite a long time ago, not one hundred million years ago. But one should not think that this was the last act of the expansion of our planet. Geologists believe that fractures of the earth's crust within the Urals have occurred more than once since then. One of the last events of this kind, they consider the formation of a split in the Southern Urals, stretching in a line from Bredov through Troitsk to Kopeisk. Here, according to the enthusiasts of the idea, such a crevice of the earth's firmament is being born, which in a couple of hundred million years can grow to the size of the Atlantic Ocean. She's just at the very beginning of this glorious path. They see the next stage as the formation of a giant depression such as Baikal - somewhere in a hundred thousand years, then the sprawling shores of the nascent sea (such as the Red) - in another two or three hundred thousand years, and then a direct path to the new Great Ocean. It would be interesting to see ...

Places of continental collisions are also permeated with numerous cracks, becoming easily permeable to ore-bearing solutions.

From the standpoint of these approaches, the abundance and richness of minerals in the Urals is easy to explain ...

No matter how they appeared on the body of the planet, the Ural Mountains for the last several tens of millions of years have invariably towered on the border of two continents, open in winter and summer to all winds, rains, snows, baked by the sun, frozen by frosty winters. All natural elements contributed to the destruction of the once majestic ridges. The tops of the mountains gradually collapsed, crumbled into countless fragments of small and large blocks, became lower, more round. So they gradually turned into what we see today - into a community of several closely spaced not too high and not too rocky chains of mountain ranges, stretching for the most part almost strictly from south to north (or vice versa). It should be noted that in the south and north of the Ural mountainous country, its mountains are both higher and more rocky. In its central part, they are significantly lowered, in some places they are just high, dignified hills.

And one more feature in the structure of the Ural Mountains can be noticed by a traveler crossing them from west to east. In the latitudinal direction, the mountainous country is asymmetrical. It passes into the Russian Plain, as it were, smoothly, a series of gradually lowering western foothills. Its transition to the West Siberian Lowland is sharper. In a significant part of the Urals, it looks like this: mountains, mountains, mountains, a cliff - and immediately the low, swampy Trans-Urals.

The modern climatic zones of the Urals were formed relatively recently, in the last couple of hundred thousand years, almost immediately before the settlement of the Urals by humans. At that time, the most distinct traces of cold snaps appeared on the planet. They are quite fully traced along the entire length of the Ural Mountains, and manifested themselves in the change of vegetation and species composition of the animal world. The cooling on the planet led to its glaciation. But an interesting detail: if in the European part of our country the tongues of glaciers penetrated to the latitude of modern Dnepropetrovsk, then in the Urals, even during the deepest glaciation, they did not penetrate south of the upper Pechora.

Judging by the fossil vegetation, the climate in the Urals was rather benign until the last ice age. Here - almost along the entire length - then grew hop diggers (a tree of the Mediterranean climate, found in the basin of the Pechora River), oaks, lindens, hornbeams, and hazel trees. Shrubs were abundant, and many spores and grass pollen were found. But during the period of glaciation, not a trace remained of the free forest-steppe woodlands with vast open spaces. It was replaced by taiga coniferous forests, and the luxurious forbs in large areas were replaced by swans and wormwood.

In preglacial times, the level of the World Ocean was one hundred fifty - two hundred meters lower than the modern one. On the shelves of the modern northern seas, in our time, many kilometers of once deep valleys have been discovered, then dug in the earth's firmament by the Pechora and Ob. And the bed of the Kama lay one hundred and fifty meters below its current level. The peaks of the Ural Mountains were on average 200-500 meters higher than the current level. And since the mountains were higher, then the rivers that originate in them flowed faster. In general, mighty streams flowed from the Urals at that time. The evidence of their power is now the placer of boulders, which they carried from the mountains far to the plain. Such boulders - up to one and a half meters in diameter - can often be found walking in the vicinity of Khanty-Mansiysk.

And the Ural rivers were much more water-abundant.

Here is a small river Khmelevka that flows today near the Cherry Mountains. Such a nondescript, meek Cinderella. And it has been established for sure that once it was a very, very large river, it flowed along the western slopes of the Potanin and Vishnevy mountains, absorbing the valley of the current Gorkaya rivulet, and flowed into the current lakes Bolshoy and Maly Kochan and Ara-Kul. Then these lakes were one huge whole - the sea, and now only in the deepest places of the ancient basin are the mirrors of its waters preserved.

Apparently, it was not for nothing that the melting of the glaciers of the epoch of the largest glaciation of the Urals received the name “the time of great waters” by specialists.

In general, the periods of glaciation had a serious impact on the formation of the modern appearance of the Urals. And not only the Urals. Let me introduce you to one hydrographic incident that took place at that time.

We have already mentioned above that the ice sheets on the Russian Plain reached the bend of the Dnieper near modern Dnepropetrovsk and to the latitude of the city of Ivdel in the Urals. Glaciers completely blocked and reshaped the structure of river flows, which was usual until then. So, the rivers of the Pechora basin began to drain into the Kama - through Vyatka. The glacier was an irresistible wall under a pond and the waters of an ancient large river that once flowed in the area between the present cities of Yuryevets and Vasilsursk. It flowed to the north and emptied into the Pra-Unzha, which then belonged to the Don basin. The loaded waters, constantly replenished by the melting glacier, overflowed the bowl of the emerging reservoir and, pouring out over the height of the watershed near present-day Kazan, poured into the streams of the Kama. Gradually, they completely saw through this watershed, formed a completely worthy river bed. This is how the great Volga River appeared.

Considering the further process of the formation of the Volga basin, geologist GF Mirchink came to the conviction that it “... is, in essence, the history of the strengthening of the power of the Kama. The tributaries of the Kama, gradually increasing in power and number, created the modern Volga. Historically, in the geological sense of this word, it would be more correct to consider the Volga as a tributary of the Kama ... "

Isn't it deeply symbolic that the streams of the Ural river Kama have modestly and imperceptibly turned into the great Russian river Volga?

Is it not from such a hydrogeological fact that the tradition began, according to which all the abundant power of the Urals, unobtrusively, quietly, but weighty, began to be personified by the power of Russia ...

From the time of the first great glaciation of the Urals, all its main climatic and landscape zones have been preserved until now - tundra (alpine), mountain-taiga, taiga-plain, forest-steppe and steppe.

This is how everything in the Urals had developed by the time a man appeared here.