Table Mountains: natural wonders of the world. Tepui Table Mountains: "The Mysterious Houses of the Gods

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14-01-2013, 23:31
Table mountains are one of the oldest geological formations on Earth, which formed about two billion years ago. The tops of such mountains, like huge tabletops, are the place where rare plants and habitat more unique animals that are not found anywhere else on the planet.

Mount Conner

In Australia, there is one of the brightest representatives of dining rooms - Mount Conner, the top of which is completely flat, and the rock itself has the shape of a horseshoe.

Brown Bluff

The 745-meter Mount Brown Bluff is located in the north of the Antarctic Peninsula. Although the rock is mostly ice, it is called "brown cliff" because in places where a pronounced reddish-brown vitreous mineral hyaloclastite is visible from under the snow cover. The shores at the foot of Brown Bluff are home to thousands of gentoo penguins and kelp gulls.

Mount Asgard

In the territory national park Baffin Island is Mount Asgard, which has two separate flat-topped hills. Asgard is named after the mythological celestial Asgard, the abode of the aesir gods.

Kukenan

Another flat-topped mountain is located in Venezuela, on the border with Guyana, not far from the famous Roraima peak - Mount Kukenan, which reaches a height of 2680 meters and a width of about three kilometers. It is considered one of the most difficult to comprehend, which is why climbers are less interested in it.

heroubreio

Table mountain Heroubreio is located in Iceland. It was formed after a volcanic eruption and is very dangerous, because collapses often occur here. It was first conquered in 1908.

Debre Damo

Mount Debre Damo has the flattest peak in the world and is located in northern Ethiopia. Here is also the oldest Christian monastery, which was built by Syrian monks in the VI century. Since the founding of the monastery, it has kept a library of ancient manuscripts.

Canyonlands mountains

Within the Canyonlands National Park, which is located in eastern state Utah, there are many rocky formations, including mountains with flat tops. There are stunningly beautiful landscapes of huge hills and mountain erosion. The Green River and Colorado Rivers flow through the park, dividing it into several districts. One of the most beautiful places is an island in the sky Island in the Sky District.

Auyantepuy

In Venezuela, Mount Auyantepuy is one of the most visited natural attractions, whose name from the language of the Pemon tribe means "Devil's Mountain". Here, the highest Angel Falls in the world fall from the crevices of Auyantepuy.

Ireland is a country of legends, green hills and various extraordinary beauties of nature. And one such strange but beautiful wonder is Mount Ben Bulben.

Mount Ben Balben is located in County Sligo, in the far north-west of Ireland, 10 kilometers north of the city Sligo. The height of the mountain is 527 meters. Ben Bulben towers over the entire county of Sligo and is its symbol. Along with Knocknary and Croag Patrick, Ben Bulben is one of the 3 famous mountains Ireland.

Clickable 4000 px

According to Irish legends, the monstrous boar from Ben Bulben lived on this mountain, which Diarmuid killed and buried in the hill of Lech-on-muik, near Drumcliff. In Drumcliffe, at the foot of Ben Bulben, according to his desire, the great Irish poet W. B. Yeats is buried.

It is believed that today the mountain looks exactly like this during the last ice age. It is known that initially it had a high "hump", which was cut off by a creeping glacier. Ben Bulben is composed almost entirely of limestone rocks.

Mount Ben Balben belongs to mesas. table mountain(German Tafelberg, Spanish mesa- in lane. table) - a mountain with a truncated, flat top. As a rule, mesas are composed of sedimentary rocks. The slopes of such mountains are usually steep, almost sheer. In the section, this type of geological formations has an elongated shape, that is, in one of the directions, the plateau at the top of the mountain is elongated. Table mountains owe their shape, truncated in the upper part, to the processes of denudation - erosion and weathering. One of the varieties of table mountains are those mountains in which their flat top is not composed of sedimentary rocks, but is covered with a hardened volcanic crust of lava.

IN Ireland, since the thirteenth century, there has been a highly developed and popular genre of place poetry. The description of mountains, valleys and lakes in a nostalgic and romantic way, often combined with the lamentations of an exile, is a typical feature of Celtic bardic poetry. One of the poems of this genre is Oisin's praise of Mount Ben Bulben (its original, "real" name is Benn Gulbain), whose powerful silhouette dominates the city of Sligo in the west of Ireland - in that region that is often called the "country of Yeats".

The poem refers to the so-called Finn cycle:

Benn Gulbain is not the same now
gloomy and gloomy, like death,
and, it happened, from those heights
it was amazing to see!

Leap of deer through the bushes,
the wheezing of dogs and the cry of catches -
you knew many strong
O mountain of great battles!

Herons groan in the evenings,
wind noise in the night branches;
it was amazing in the morning
listen to the singing of the first birds.

See the young warriors
brave Fenians of the forests,
and on their leashes -
fighting ferocious dogs.

Feel the chill of the night dew
that lay on the side of the mountain,
hear the fox yelp,
the lonely cry of an eagle.

Or sitting on a stump
listen to the thrush pipe ...
Patrick! a century has passed, what a day,
it was wonderful to live then.

But even if Ben Bulben were an ordinary mountain, it still remained no less attractive for travelers - the beauty of its slopes will captivate the heart at first sight. The gently sloping slopes are overgrown with dense green grass, and at around 300 meters in height, the mountain begins to rise sharply, almost vertically - this is the phenomenon of Ben Bulben. Travelers say that the mountain is especially beautiful at dawn - but it's better to see once than hear a hundred times!

South Africa

“The table mountain is so named because it looks like a table, but it looks like a chest, and a piano, and a wall - whatever you want, least of all a mountain. Its sides seem smooth, meanwhile, large ledges, bumps and depressions are visible through the telescope; but they disappear into the immensity of the block. I peered into the potholes of Table Mountain, washed by channels and forming the appearance of the so-called "table legs". At this distance, what from a distance seemed like moss, grass, was a whole forest of bushes and trees. The whole mountain, taken indivisibly, seems to be some kind of gloomy, dead, silent mass, and yet there is a lot of life there: farms and gardens climb on its sole; baboons nest in the forests, snakes teem, jackals and wild goats run around. - this is how Goncharov spoke about Table Mountain in the book of travel essays "Frigate" Pallada "".

Location

A mountain located southwest of Cape Town on south coast Table Bay, one of business cards cities. To the east of Table Mountain is the 975 m high Devil's Peak, and to the west are more low mountains: Lion's Head and Signal Mountain, 640 and 335 m, respectively, as well as the famous peak of the Twelve Apostles.

Origin

Table Mountain is the northern tip mountain range, which stretches between Cape Town and the Cape Good Hope. The mountain itself is quite old - it was formed about 600 million years ago and is the remnant of a mountain range that has existed for hundreds of millions of years. It is composed of sandstone and quartzite, lying on more ancient granites and slates.

legends

The huge Table Mountain, towering high above Cape Town, is a real decoration of the city. It looks majestic, like a real table with a snow-white tablecloth of clouds, often enveloping the top.

There are many legends associated with this phenomenon. Here is one of them: “A certain resident of Cape Town named Fan Hanks liked to smoke tobacco that smelled so disgusting that the townspeople escorted him to the side of the mountain, away from the settlement. There, smoking, he met the devil, who offered him a contest: who will smoke whom. They lit a cigarette, and a cloud of their smoke covered the entire mountain. Intermittently, this competition continues to this day, and when the mountain is covered with a white "tablecloth", the locals often refer to Fan Hank and his pipe.

Description

And when there is no tablecloth, you can see its flat top, which is 3.2 kilometers wide. Her steep slopes rise up more than a kilometer (data vary from 1067 to 1087 meters).

Europeans called the table mountain. locals Mount Hyori Kwaggo has long been called "sea mountain" because it comes so close to the sea. And indeed, approaching the city from the sea, you first see the mountain, and then the city itself. Table Mountain has long served as a landmark for sailors approaching Table Bay. On the Atlantic side, the sandstone ledge that breaks the horizon line is known as the Twelve Apostles.

When viewed from the Cape Town Harbor, the mountain seems to be a blue-green monolith, slightly trembling in the haze in the heat. Like a big table that is sometimes only covered with a tablecloth that never goes down to the lower slopes. Clouds are blown north by southeasterly winds. And it is clear that a tablecloth of clouds creates a special unpredictable climate: in winter, the temperature here can drop below 0 ° C, and precipitation falls annually 3 times more than in Cape Town itself (in Cape Town, 650 mm of precipitation falls annually, on Table Mountain their number reaches 1830 mm per year). Such a large number of rainfall leads to the washing out of the rock, ravines form on the slope of the mountain, and the deepest of them - the Gorge - is also the shortest way to the top. But from the top you can really see a miracle - at the tip South Africa(Cape of Good Hope) two great oceans meet: the Atlantic and the Indian. The temperature difference between warm and cold currents causes frequent powerful storms.

table mountains

The name of the Cape Town Table Mountain is called the mountains of this type all over the world, there is also the constellation Table Mountain in the star catalogs. Table mountain (German Tafelberg, English Table mountain, Spanish Mesa) is a mountain with a truncated, flat top. As a rule, mesas are composed of sedimentary rocks. The slopes of such a mountain are usually steep, almost sheer. In the section, this type of geological formations has an elongated shape, that is, in one of the directions, the plateau at the top of the mountain is elongated. Table mountains owe their shape, truncated in the upper part, to the processes of denudation - erosion and weathering. One of the varieties of table mountains are those mountains in which their flat top is not composed of sedimentary rocks, but is covered with a hardened volcanic crust of lava.

Conquest

Table Mountain was discovered by Europeans as early as 1488, when Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias tried to find a way to India. He called this place "Storm Cape". After 22 years, the Portuguese sailors were killed by the local Hottentot tribe, and the ships began to enter the bay extremely rarely. The first European to climb Table Mountain was the Portuguese navigator António de Saldanha in 1503. In 1652, a Dutch settlement was established at Table Bay. Its purpose was to supply the passing ships of the East India Company with provisions. The first settlers built a fortress, which can still be seen in Cape Town.

In 1929, a cable car was built on the mountain, and in 1998 the old cabins were replaced with carriages that could accommodate 65 people. In the same year, the mountain became part of the national park, called Table Mountain Park since 2004.

national park

The mountain is popular tourist place, but the vegetable and animal worlds. To protect nature, Table Mountain National Park was opened in 2004.

About 2285 species grow on Table Mountain, many of which are endemic, that is, they grow only here, they cannot be found anywhere else. Here you can find rare orchids. An evergreen shrub grows on steep slopes, and the area covered by it is called fynbos. It is slightly crowded by the pines brought here. The fynbos itself is a fire hazard, in nature it is updated like this. But forest fires and human indiscretion have led to the extinction of 15 species of endemic plants and another 140 species are on the verge of extinction.

From the platform at the top of the mountain you can see the oceans and almost the entire peninsula. Sometimes it is possible to see southern whales that swim in coastal waters.

Several peaks adjoin Table Mountain - the Twelve Apostles, Devil's Peak and Lion's Head. All of them are part of the National Park of the Cape Peninsula.

Tourism

Table Mountain is included in the UN list of World Heritage Sites natural heritage, has become a symbol of Cape Town and imprinted on its flag. The mountain is easily accessible from the city center. And then - at your discretion. Now there are many trails, but the climb does not promise to be very easy, it will take about 3 hours to go. In 1929 the first cable car, which was later updated in 1997 - modern cable cars were installed.

The mountain should be climbed in good clear weather, while all the clouds have not yet closed. IN bad weather the trip doesn't make sense. The recommended time for hiking is from May 1st to September 15th.

Table Mountain is one of the most beautiful viewing platforms peace. At the top, everything is well equipped: viewing telescopes are installed for tourists, there is a restaurant, a souvenir shop. You can see not only the whole city, but the entire peninsula during the day, and then you must stay to enjoy the stunning view of the sunset.

Table Mountain is a natural corner that has preserved wonders. One of the constellations of the southern hemisphere is named after the mountain. Here, at the top, you can feel the presence of the secrets of ancient times and an amazing unity with nature, for which people travel all over the world.

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