Google Earth Community: Guilin

One of the first images of China that I remember was a movie in Grade Two (1970) of cormorant fishers on the Pearl River. The karst limestone formations of Guilin WAS China to my impressionable mind for years, and I always wanted to travel there. I have since been all over the country, but not to this town, which received 1.88 million tourists in 2001. Curious about how those formations look from the air, I downloaded these overlays from Earthsat. I had hoped for a dramatic view.

Alas you will have to use your imagination, because the resolution of the underlaying topography is not high enough to "pop out" these hills. Still, it's an interesting view of a fascinating part of the world.

The city Guilin is often considered the capital of Karst. Then what is Karst? The word "karst" is actually a regional name for a district in Yugoslavia, an eastern European country where stony and barren ground are its main features. Later, karst was used to describe "the terrain with distinctive hydrology and landforms arising from a combination of high rock solubility and well developed secondary porosity (Ford and Williams, 1989.) Theoretically, two kinds of tropical tower Karst doinate the area: Peak - forest plains and peak - cluster depressions. Xu Xiake (1587 - 1641), a great traveler and a pioneer Karstologist during China's Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644), offered a systematic description of Karst in his famous "Xu Xiake's Travels". You can find a statue of Xu Xiake in front of the main buildings of the Karst Geology Research Institute in Guilin. A very good guide to the geology of the region is found on this page from the Karst Institute

Geologists recently discovered four splendid natural bridges on a 1-km path—a world geological wonder—in Xing’an County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region,according to a 2001 issue of Beijing Review. The bridges in Guilin range in height from 40 to 100 meters, and are 30-60 meters wide. Splendid, peculiar, dangerous, enchanting and elegant, they are formed by natural karst caves linked to each other. Experts from the Karst Geology Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Geology noted that the type of natural bridges in Baishi are rarely seen elsewhere in China.

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gbonny

Neutiquam erro (I am not lost)

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