Karst caves stalactites and stalagmites. How are karst caves formed? Stalactites and stalagmites, other stone formations
Stalactites photos of caves and interesting facts about them
Most colorful photo caves containing stalactites and stalagmites. These usually limestone formations hanging from the ceiling or growing out of the ground are simply mesmerizing. How old are they supposed to be? Many millions, as tour guides classically claim, or can they grow in a shorter time?
(Stalactites photo #1.1)
(Stalactites photo #1.2)
What is a stalactite and stalagmite? The water that seeps into the cave contains particles of limestone or other minerals. When a drop of water flows through the gap and falls, the mineral dissolved in it remains on the ceiling of the cave. Further, drop by drop, these deposits grow downward and after a long or short time, a stalactite is formed on the ceiling of the cave - a hard icicle made of stone or salt. Below, under it, a stalagmite grows, from falling drops from a stalactite. After some time, both limestone formations grow, meet and join into a single column.
(Stalactites photo #2.1)
(Stalactites photo #2.2)
“Caves are formed by the action of groundwater, but how this happens, we do not know,” say evolutionary scientists. But, judging by the new data, it turns out that it is sulfuric acid that affects the formation of at least 10% of the caves in the Guadeloupe mountains in New Mexico and Texas. This means that the caves could have formed much faster than in millions of years.
(Stalactites photo #3.1)
(Stalactites photo #3.2)
The world's tallest stalagmite is located in the Armand Cave in France. According to scientists, its growth rate is 3 mm per year. Then this stalagmite had to reach its height of 38 m in 12,700 years. Such data are not consistent with the age of the stalagmite, which was established by radiometric dating (millions of years). Is the method wrong?
(Stalactites photo #4.1)
(Stalactites photo #4.2)
At Cape Levin Western Australia there is a water wheel, which is simply overgrown with stone. And it happened in less than 65 years. This suggests that such natural growths can form quite quickly. But why, then, according to evolutionists, stalactites and stalagmites, whose age is unknown, are formed over thousands or even millions of years?
(Stalactites photo #5.1)
(Stalactites photo #5.2)
Due to the fact that the discoveries about the rapid growth of stalactites have become known today, we can say that the growth of stalactites that we see in the most beautiful limestone caves did not take whole epochs. These beautiful formations could grow very quickly in just a few thousand years during the cataclysmic global Flood.
(Stalactites photo #6.1)
(Stalactites photo #6.2)
Often a stalagmite joins with a stalactite and a column appears. The largest stone column in Carlsbad is over 30 meters high. The ceilings of some caves are hung with short stalactites, like a fringe. Shine in other caves stone stalactites in the form of needles on the walls. There are stalactites that grow to the sides and even up.
(Stalactites photo #7.1)
(Stalactites photo #7.2)
In October 1953, National Geographic magazine published a photograph of a bat that fell on a stalagmite in the famous carlsbad caves, New Mexico, and hardened on it. The stalagmite grew so fast that it was able to save the bat before the animal began to decompose.
(Stalactites photo #8.1)
(Stalactites photo #8.2)
In the Jenolan Caverns and various other places, you can see stalactites and stalagmites that have grown right in the structures built by man. Like the Lincoln Memorial, the Jenolan structures contain a cement mortar that is highly permeable, making these formations grow rapidly. Unfortunately, the grown formations are very porous and brittle.
(Stalactites photo #9.1)
(Stalactites photo #9.2)
In Philadelphia, anyone can observe many bridges in which stalactites grow. The length of some of them is more than 30 cm. Based on the age of the bridges, we conclude that all these stalactites are less than 56 years old. Now that's speed!
(Stalactites photo #10.1)
(Stalactites photo #10.2)
The world of stalactites and stalagmites is beautiful and mysterious. These vivid photos tell us about God's amazing laws in the world of geology, about our history, which is not millions of years old, but only 5-6 thousand. And these majestic natural formations tell us about the greatness of their Creator
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How are formed karst caves? Stalactites and stalagmites - what are they? Main breed Crimean mountains- limestone. Cracked rocks easily absorb moisture. Rain and melt water with dissolved carbon dioxide flows through them deep into the mountain. This very weak carbonic acid interacts with limestone (calcium carbonate) converts it into a soluble state (calcium bicarbonate), for many millennia it washes and cuts its own channel. This is how a growing watered cave is formed. With time underground river can find a new crack and go down another one, two, three, or even all six floors, as in Kizil-Kobe (Red Caves). The lower "wet" caves continue to grow, the upper ones retain their shape.
Stages of formation of karst caves
- Rain and melt water seeps through the capillaries through the soil with rocks, absorbs carbon dioxide. Small streams through cracks gather into an underground river.
- Water (weak carbonic acid) continues to wash its course. The limestone becomes soluble and is washed out of the rocks, making the water hard.
- In the middle of the cave, the water goes into a crack, begins to create another channel for itself. Stalactites grow in an abandoned cave (already free from the river).
- The river washes a completely new course. Large stalactites grow in the cave.
How are stalactites formed?
Drips from the vaults of the caves hard water. These are sediments transformed into rocks, which seeped from the surface of the earth through the “roof”, and their own cave condensate. A reverse reaction takes place on the surface of the stone. Calcium bicarbonate dissolved in water turns back into carbonate, releasing carbon dioxide. In everyday life, a similar process leads to the appearance of plaque on the bathrooms, scale in pots and radiators.
First, a ring appears on the rock, then a growing tube. Until the hole is clogged, water drips from it, and gradually a sharp, straight stone icicle grows - stalactite. If the watercourse is good, if there are no neighboring drops, the stalactite will be single and may grow large. Where there has been constant rain for centuries, a whole forest of stalactites grows, usually of different lengths and thicknesses, sometimes of different colors. If the drops are very small, dense thickets of “straws” may appear, more than a meter long and several millimeters thick, transparent, shining in the light of a lantern, like an exquisite underground chandelier.
What are seasonal stalactite rings?
Outwardly, they look like growth rings of wood. They can also be used to determine age. weather in times that are thousands and even millions of years distant from us. To do this, determine the isotopic and chemical composition of the desired "ring". It is important not to make a mistake, After all, there are so many rings!
A modern ion mass spectrometer allows you to take samples from layers one hundredth of a millimeter thick - this corresponds to an analysis accuracy of one year.
How long do stalactites grow?
The growth rate of cave stalactites can be very different. It depends on the amount and composition of water flowing from the "ceiling", on the temperature and humidity of the air in the cave. It is difficult to even talk about some average values. In some caves, meter-long stalactites grow in a thousand years, in others - in five thousand years. But in any case, a broken “stone icicle” is an irreparable damage to nature. A trace of a moral crime, like killing an animal for fun.
Stalagmites, stalagnates and other sinter formations
What other forms are sinter formations in caves? In the place where the drop falls, first a speck appears, then a tubercle of insoluble salts (mostly the same calcium carbonate). The bump grows into a stone stump, sometimes pointed, but more often flat or rounded by the erratic splashing of hard water. This is how it is formed stalagmite. Usually it is larger, thicker and stronger than a stalactite, because water flows down its walls and all the released carbonate goes to construction. And also because the stalactite sooner or later breaks off under its own weight, but the stalagmite never.
If the movement of water is not disturbed, the stalactite fuses with the stalagmite. The strongest underground column is formed - stalagnate. From now on, nothing but earthquakes threatens her, so stalagnates can grow to gigantic sizes.
Flowing down the sloping vaults of the cave, hard water leaves behind not specks, but strips of calcium carbonate. These strips grow in thickness and eventually turn into thin flat sail. They are smooth and wavy, like the edges of a tablecloth, they can cover the entire wall to the ground, or they can remain in the form of pasties, forming a “cornice” or “chandelier”, and then grow like ordinary stalactites. Everything depends on the movement of the whimsical, capricious, “lazy” water drop, which always chooses the easiest and most profitable path for itself. Usually scallops tinkle when you tap them with a stick, so walls overgrown with scallops are called xylophones or authorities.
The most interesting and unusual of karst deposits are helictites, or eccentrics. Starting to grow like stalactites, they bend strangely and bizarrely. Sometimes these are second-order stalactites, they grow like branches on a tree trunk. Why do stalactites begin to grow sideways, like drusen of crystals, or even twist into a spiral, turning into helictites? Science does not give an exact answer. The mechanics and chemistry of helictite growth are boundary phenomena between two forms: sintered and crystalline. Helictites were found in the caves "200 years of Simferopol", Nizhny Bair.
Helictites form in places where the air is still; there, the same calcium bicarbonate passes into a solid state, dissolved not in water dripping from the vaults, but in the moisture of the air.
Underground waterfalls also leave behind traces of limestone. It grows in a dense natural layer and will remain an ornament for tens and hundreds of thousands of years. Even after the unlucky river leaves the upper floors of the cave, we see frozen stone waterfalls…
Drops and streams flow into the baths, along the edges of which a limestone roller grows - goura dam. Gur baths go on with their own lives: stone “water lilies” and “lotuses” grow with rounded “buds” and flat “leaves” lying in the water.
Ripens in some baths cave pearl. Is not gem, but the composition of sea and cave pearls is the same. It is generally accepted that a grain of sand that has fallen into a bath is rotated by a water stream and is gradually enveloped in limestone (which in pure form transparent as glass). But pearls are formed in very quiet backwaters ...
Wet, soft, shapeless mass of white color, sometimes with bluish tint, named moon milk. It's the same calcium carbonate. Moon milk decorates the caves in its own way, and when dried, it crumbles into a fine powder when pressed. How moon milk, the true secret of karst caves, is formed, only obscure assumptions are made about this. Nothing in nature, except for calcite, exists in this state. Moon milk is dry and wet, liquid and dense, viscous and fluid. In fact, this substance is neither solid nor liquid, it is generally unclear what kind ... Scientists bypass this topic, leaving exotic lovers a clear field for thought and fantasy.
Aragonite crystals
When the water leaves, the growth of the cave stops, but its interior decoration continues to be enriched with new decorations. Humidity in deep stone cavities approaches 100%. Water vapor is saturated with calcium bicarbonate ions, and crystals grow on stones (more often along cracks).
The bizarre, capriciousness of the figures of aerosol crystallization is incomparable with any streaks: created according to the laws of the microcosm, they depend on the composition and concentration of ions, on the paths of movement of water molecules, on the rules for constructing crystal lattices with all their additions and deviations. Aragonite It is a hard variety of calcite. It is formed when enough low temperatures, most often underground - in caves, ore deposits, in cold springs.
In the caves you can find the smallest crystals of aragonite. When there are a lot of them, they glow in the beam of a lantern, like heavenly stars. Sometimes large acute-angled crystals grow, and nearby - small ones, collected in "twigs", in "fluffs", in "snowflakes". These can be sharp-sharp “hedgehogs”, “thriving” stalactites of various shades, individual and collected in inflorescences “cave flowers” of different colors and unimaginable shapes.
The most interesting and varied underground ornaments grow as a result of the combined action of liquid water and ion-rich aerosol. Graceful anthropomorphic figurines, small animals, "hairy Agos", "jellyfish" with a fringe of "tentacles" along the edges, "anemones" ... In a word, get your camera ready, open your notebook, fantasize! But everything will be poor, everything is not right: we are mere mortals, and the caves were created by Her Majesty Nature. Unequal.
Lime dropper, lime icicle, sinter formation, helictid, mukarn, ledge down Dictionary of Russian synonyms. stalactite n., number of synonyms: 8 ledge (61) ... Synonym dictionary
STALACTITE, a sintered mineral formation consisting of tiny crystals of CALCIUM CARBONATE, hanging in the form of an icicle or fringe from the ceiling of the CAVES, composed of limestones of the Carboniferous period. Stalactites are formed by water, slowly ... ... Scientific and technical encyclopedic dictionary
STALACTITE, stalactite, husband. (from Greek stalaktos dripping) (miner). A calcareous growth on the ceiling of a cave formed by percolating drops of lime-laden water. Explanatory Dictionary of Ushakov. D.N. Ushakov. 1935 1940 ... Explanatory Dictionary of Ushakov
STALACTITE, a, husband. An icicle-shaped calcareous growth descending from the ceiling of a cave, formed by seeping drops. | adj. stalactite, oh, oh. Explanatory dictionary of Ozhegov. S.I. Ozhegov, N.Yu. Shvedova. 1949 1992 ... Explanatory dictionary of Ozhegov
Miner. sinter formation growing on the ceilings of caves, mines and descending down in the form of icicles. Formed during the evaporation of minerals. water seeping through limestone cracks. Such water is hard, since the content. calcium carbonate ... ... Geological Encyclopedia
stalactite- a, m. stalactite f. gr. stalaktos dripping. A calcareous build-up on the ceiling or upper part of the walls of underground voids (caves, galleries, etc.), formed by seeping drops of water containing calcium bicarbonate. BAS 1. Lime ... ... Historical Dictionary of Gallicisms of the Russian Language
stalactite- Leaky drip formation in the form of icicles or fringes hanging from the ceiling of a karst cave, arising from the constant supply of carbonate in the form of calcite from percolating groundwater ... Geography Dictionary
STALAGMITE or STALACTITE (Greek, from stalagma thickened drops). Lime deposits formed at the bottom of the caves, due to the slow and continuous dripping of lime water from the vaults, have the shape of cones with their tops up. Dictionary of foreign ... ... Dictionary of foreign words of the Russian language
M. Natechnoe lime formation in the form of large icicles on the ceiling or upper part of the walls of underground voids (caves, galleries, etc.), formed by seeping drops of water saturated with calcium and carbon dioxide. Explanatory Dictionary of Efremova ... Modern Dictionary Russian language Efremova
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Many of us believe that rocks and mountains are solid, and we often use these words as epithets. But if they really were such, then a person would never see a stalagmite and a stalactite. This is due to the fact that a drop of water, flowing through the thickness of the rock, descends into the cave, carrying an insignificant amount of limestone. Then it passes through the earth into the lower layers of the mantle and evaporates into them under the influence of heat. But the material that it pulls along with it remains on the floor or on the ceiling of the cave through which our drop managed to seep.
Stalagmite and stalactite are limestone outgrowths that are formed during the process of water alluvium. However, the water pressure is not significant, so these formations have a rather slow growth. In addition to washing limestone deep into the caves, the drops also collect calcium and some other substances. This can explain the variety of colors and shades that the stalagmite and stalactite have.
Depending on the speed at which water enters, the growths under consideration form in the caves. When it flows down slowly, a stalactite appears, which has its origin on the ceiling. And if the water drips fast enough so as not to linger on top itself and wash off various substances on the floor of the cave, then a stalagmite is formed. Sometimes it happens that the age of these growths reaches a high level, and they are combined into one column. Since their union has taken place, they become stalagnates. The most rare thing to see is how the chamber in the cave is divided into two separate halls by a stalagnate formation. This is called draping. It is worth noting that sparkling stones can often be observed in stalagnates. crystal, which is formed in the mountains. Often, drapery and stalagnates are broken in order to get these sparkling pebbles.
Despite all the differences, stalagmite and stalactite have similarities. It lies in the composition. There cannot be different stalactites and stalagmites in one cave. All the elements of which they are composed will be similar to each other. The growth of formations is a long process. One centimeter of a stalactite can form in a hundred years, or even more. And stalagmites generally grow even longer. This is because water slows down as it travels through rocks. And rarely is she able to maintain enough pressure to fall to the floor of the cave along with limestone.
You can’t even imagine how beautiful Photos can convey them appearance V in general terms, but when you look at them from different angles or shine a flashlight, they seem to change their colors and shapes.
There is another theory of the formation of these cave growths. It was introduced in 1970 and focused on the fact that stalactites and stalagmites are formed under the action of a special fungus. When a favorable environment is created for its growth, it begins to develop. However, if this theory is correct, then why has not an artificial cave with stalactites been created yet? In any case, no matter what secret these extraordinary cave elements keep in themselves, they delight the eyes of those happy people who had the opportunity to see them at least once.
Visitors to the karst caves can watch a spectacle that is unique in its beauty - groups of stalactites and stalagmites. They grow in chaotic heaps and form into large and small groups. Do you know what it is all about? How are they formed and how do they differ from each other?
Let's start with the basics. Why are karst caves
The earth's crust is heterogeneous in composition. At the stage of formation of land and the oceans, various rocks and minerals. So, for example, volcanic activity with high temperature and pressure led to the appearance of basalt and granite. But deposits of water-soluble rocks, such as limestone, chalk or gypsum, were formed in less extreme conditions. For millions of years, water has undermined and washed away these rocks, leaving behind large and small voids. So there were caves, which began to be called karst. The fact is that karst is a void inside some body. Most of famous caves - karst origin. However, other processes of cave formation are also known, but there are no stalactites and stalagmites in them.
How did the terms "stalactite" and "stalagmite" originate?
The terms "stalactite" and "stalagmite" were coined by the Danish naturalist Ole Worm. It happened in 1655. Both terms are related to the Greek language. Stalactite is translated as "leaked drop by drop". That is, it is a kind of lime icicle hanging from the ceiling of a karst cave. The chemogenic formation is sometimes not composed of limestone, but of other sedimentary rocks. In shape, stalactites resemble ice icicles, fringes, thin straws or combs with teeth of different levels.
Stalagmite means "drop". This is a sintered mineral (calcareous) icicle that grows in a cone or column from the bottom of the cave. Sometimes the main building material for a stalagmite is not limestone, but gypsum or salt. But this is an infrequent occurrence.
Education process
The shape and size of calcareous outgrowths and icicles depend on the size of the cave and its location. Even in the densest rock there are cracks and micro-slits through which water seeps into the karst caves. Rain and snow have to overcome a long and hard way, washing away calcium and other materials along the way. The pores through which moisture seeps in are very small. Because of this, water does not run off in streams, but drips from the ceiling of the caves. Each droplet carries with it a small amount of sedimentary rocks (mainly limestone). Then the drop evaporates, and the rock dissolved in it remains on the ceiling or falls to the floor. In this way, a calcareous icicle is created that hangs under the arch in the cave, or a sedimentary outgrowth appears, rising towards it. As a result, the cave acquires a mystical-fabulous appearance, giving rise to legends about the underworld.
Despite the fact that the process goes everywhere according to the same scenario, there are no identical caves in the world. Moreover, each "hall" in the cave is unique. Nature does not allow repetition.
Education rate
The formation of stalactites and stalagmites is a long process. According to scientists, it takes about 100 years to grow by 1 cm. The growth rate depends on the speed of the drop, the humidity of the air inside the cave, the temperature, and the composition of the dissolved rocks. Accurate growth calculations cannot be made. When trying to research groups of scientists received such conflicting results that it was impossible to bring them to a "common denominator". Because the input data, such as droplet intensity, fall height, evaporation rate, amount of sedimentary materials, and so on, were constantly changing. Sometimes the calcareous icicle stopped growing altogether for several hundred years.
What do stalactites and stalagmites look like?
Stalagmites are always thicker and larger than stalactites, since all the sedimentary rock that has fallen with water flows down the walls, completing the build-up. Also, stalactites sometimes fall under their own weight, while stalagmites do not.
If the movement of water drops is not disturbed, then the stalactite and stalagmite "solder" into an underground column. This calcareous icicle is called stalagnate. Sometimes the stalagnates grow together and separate the halls with lime drapery.
On the sloping vaults of the caves, stalactites are in the form of bands that form sails. They can be straight or wavy. You need to understand, no matter how many caves you explore, all stalactites will be unique.
