Jun/24

The Aktau Mountains – a Unique Natural Monument

No comments · Posted by Sergei Rzhevsky in Nature, Photos, Travel

The Aktau (“White”) Mountains, located in the Altyn Emel National Park in the south-east of Kazakhstan in Almaty Oblast, arose on the territory where the waters of an ancient ocean used to splash in the era when dinosaurs inhabited the Earth. They are about 400 million years old.

These colorful chalky hills, formed from bluish-gray sandstone and red clay, interspersed with yellow and pink cornelian, jasper and white quartz, reminiscent of a layer cake. These lifeless slopes, made of fragile rocks, intricately cut by erosion, are so unusual that it is impossible to take your eyes off them. Photos by: Sergey Terekhov.

Whimsical form of canyons and cliffs turns Aktau Mountains into a maze. Such an unusual relief is the result of weathering and erosion that occurred over millions of years. The Aktau Mountains, amazing in their beauty, are an open-air museum of our planet’s distant past, one of the world’s largest paleontological deposits.

The flora of the Aktau Mountains is quite diverse, although there are no fertile soils here, only pebbles, sand and compressed clay. Saxaul, a common inhabitant of desert landscapes, is occasionally found on the slopes. The fauna is represented by gazelles, kulans, wild goats, many birds and rodents. Some representatives of the animal and plant world are listed in the Red Book.

Staying in these mountains, you involuntarily fall out of modern times and come into contact with eternity. These landscapes existed thousands of years ago, this is how our ancestors saw them, this is how we see them now.

The Aktau Mountains are located in the southeast of the Altyn-Emel National Park, south of the Dzungarian Alatau Range, 72 km from the village of Basshi. The length of the Aktau Mountains from east to west is 30 km, from north to south – up to 2 km. The total area is about 50 square km.