The Ural Mountains are a mountain range on the border of Europe and Asia, stretching from north to south. In geography, it is customary to divide these mountains according to the nature of the relief, natural conditions and other features into Pai-Khoi, the Polar Urals, the Subpolar, Northern, Middle, Southern Urals and Mugodzhary. It is necessary to distinguish between the concepts of the Ural Mountains and the Urals: in a broader sense, the territory of the Urals includes the regions adjacent to the mountain system - the Urals, Cis-Urals and Trans-Urals.
The relief of the Ural Mountains is the main watershed range and several side ranges separated by wide depressions. In the Far North - glaciers and snowfields, in the middle part - mountains with smoothed peaks, the Ural Mountains are old, they are about 300 million years old, they are noticeably eroded. The highest peak - Mount Narodnaya - is about two kilometers high.
The watershed of large rivers runs along the mountain range: the Ural rivers belong mainly to the basin of the Caspian Sea (Kama with Chusovaya and Belaya, Ural). Pechora, Tobol and others belong to the system of one of the largest rivers in Siberia - the Ob. There are many lakes on the eastern slope of the Urals.
The landscapes of the Ural Mountains are predominantly forested, there is a noticeable difference in the nature of vegetation in different sides mountains: on the western slope - mainly dark coniferous, spruce-fir forests (in the Southern Urals - in some places mixed and broad-leaved), on the eastern slope - light-coniferous pine-larch forests. In the south - forest-steppe and steppe (mostly plowed).
The Ural Mountains have long been of interest to geographers, including from the point of view of their unique location. In the era of Ancient Rome, these mountains seemed so distant to scientists that they were seriously called Riphean, or Ripean: literally translated from Latin - “coastal”, and in an expanded sense - “mountains at the edge of the earth”. They received the name Hyperborean (from the Greek “extreme northern”) on behalf of the mythical country of Hyperborea, it was used for a thousand years, until in 1459 the Fra Mauro world map appeared, on which the “edge of the world” was already shifted beyond the Urals.
It is believed that the mountains were discovered by the Novgorodians in 1096, during one of the campaigns to Pechora and Yugra by a squad of Novgorod ushkuins engaged in fur trade, trade and collection of yasak. At that time, the mountains did not receive any name. At the beginning of the XV century. Russian settlements appear on the upper Kama - Anfalovsky town and Sol-Kamskaya.
The first known name of these mountains is contained in documents at the turn of the 15th-16th centuries, where they are called Kamen: so in Ancient Rus' called any large rock or cliff. On the "Big Drawing" - the first map of the Russian state, compiled in the second half of the 16th century. - Ural is designated as Big Stone. In the XVI-XVIII centuries. the name Belt appears, reflecting the geographical position of the mountains between two plains. There are such variants of names as Big Stone, Big Belt, Stone Belt, Big Belt Stone.
The name "Ural" was originally used only for the territory of the Southern Urals and was taken from the Bashkir language, which meant "height" or "hill". By the middle of the XVIII century. the name "Ural Mountains" is already applied to the entire mountain system.
The Ural Mountains are a range on the border of Europe and Asia, as well as a natural border within Russia, to the east of which are Siberia and Far East, and to the west - the European part of the country.
Such a figurative expression is resorted to whenever it is required to give a short and colorful description of the natural resources of the Ural Mountains.
The antiquity of the Ural Mountains created unique conditions for the development of minerals: as a result of prolonged destruction by erosion, the deposits literally came to the surface. The combination of energy sources and raw materials predetermined the development of the Urals as a mining region.
Iron, copper, chromium and nickel ores, potash salts, asbestos, coal, precious and semi-precious stones - Ural gems have been mined here since ancient times. Since the middle of the XX century. oil and gas fields are being developed.
Russia has long been developing the lands adjacent to the Ural Mountains, occupying the Komi-Permyak towns, annexing the Udmurt and Bashkir territories: in the middle of the 16th century. after the defeat of the Kazan Khanate, most of Bashkiria and the Kama part of Udmurtia voluntarily became part of Russia. A special role in securing Russia in the Urals was played by the Ural Cossacks, who received the highest permission to engage in free arable farming here. The merchants Stroganovs laid the foundation for the purposeful development of the wealth of the Ural Mountains, having received from Tsar Ivan IV a charter on the Ural lands "and what lies in them."
At the beginning of the XVIII century. large-scale factory construction began in the Urals, caused by the needs of both economic development country, and the needs of the military departments. Under Peter I, copper-smelting and iron foundries were built here, and subsequently large industrial centers were formed around them: Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Perm, Nizhny Tagil, Zlatoust. Gradually, the Ural Mountains found themselves in the center of the largest mining region in Russia, along with Moscow and St. Petersburg.
In the era of the USSR, the Urals became one of the industrial centers of the country, the most famous enterprises are the Ural Heavy Machinery Plant (Uralmash), the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant (ChTZ), the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Plant (Magnitogorsk), during the years of the Great Patriotic War industrial production was exported to the Urals from the territories of the USSR occupied by the Germans.
In recent decades, the industrial importance of the Ural Mountains has declined markedly: many deposits are almost exhausted, the level of pollution environment pretty big.
The bulk of the local population lives on the territory of the Ural economic region and in the Republic of Bashkortostan. In more northern regions belonging to the North-Western and West Siberian economic regions population is extremely rare.
During the industrial development of the Ural Mountains, as well as the plowing of the surrounding lands, hunting and deforestation, the habitats of many animals were destroyed, and many species of animals and birds disappeared, among them - a wild horse, saiga, bustard, little bustard. Herds of deer, which used to graze throughout the Urals, now migrated deep into the tundra. However, the measures taken to protect and reproduce the fauna of the Urals managed to preserve in the reserves brown bear, wolf, wolverine, fox, sable, ermine, lynx. Where it has not yet been possible to restore populations of local species, acclimatization of imported individuals is being successfully carried out: for example, in the Ilmensky Reserve - sika deer, beaver, maral, raccoon dog, American mink.

general information

Location: between the East European and West Siberian plains.

Geographic division: Pai-Khoi Ridge, Polar Urals (from Konstantinov Kamen to the upper reaches of the Khulga River), Subpolar Urals (the section between the Khulga and Shchugor rivers), Northern Urals (Voi) (from the Shchugor River to Kosvinsky Kamen and Mount Oslyanka), Middle Urals (Shor ) (from Mount Oslyanka to the Ufa River) and the Southern Urals (the southern part of the mountains below the city of Orsk), Mugodzhary (Kazakhstan).

Economic regions: Ural, Volga, Northwestern, West Siberian.
Administrative affiliation: Russian Federation(Perm, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Kurgan, Orenburg, Arkhangelsk and Tyumen regions, Udmurt Republic, Republic of Bashkortostan, Republic of Komi), Kazakhstan (Aktobe region).

Large cities: - 1,428,262 people (2015), - 1,182,221 people (2015), Ufa - 1,096,702 people. (2014), - 1,036,476 people (2015), Izhevsk - 642,024 people. (2015), Orenburg - 561,279 people. (2015), Magnitogorsk - 417,057 people. (2015), Nizhny Tagil - 356,744 people. (2015), Kurgan - 326,405 people. (2015).

Languages: Russian, Bashkir, Udmurt, Komi-Permyak, Kazakh.
Ethnic composition: Russians, Bashkirs, Udmurts, Komi, Kazakhs.
Religions: Orthodoxy, Islam, traditional beliefs.

Currency unit: ruble, tenge.
Rivers: the Caspian Sea basin (Kama with Chusovaya and Belaya, Ural), the Arctic Ocean basin (Pechora with Usoy; Tobol, Iset, Tura belong to the Ob system).

Lakes: Tavatui, Argazi, Uvildy, Turgoyak, Big Pike.

Numbers

Length: more than 2600 km from north to south (with Pai-Khoi and Mugodzhary).

Width: from 40 to 150 km.

Geological age: 250 to 350 Ma.
highest point: Mount Narodnaya (1895 m).
Other peaks: Karpinsky (1878 m), Yamantau (1638 m), Manaraga (1662 m), Telposiz (1617 m), Konzhakovsky Kamen (1569 m), Payer (1499 m), Oslyanka (1119 m), Middle Baseg (994 m).

Climate and weather

Continental.
January average temperature: from -20°С (Polar Urals) to -15°С (Southern Urals).

July average temperature: from +9°С (Polar Urals) to +20°С (Southern Urals).

Average annual rainfall: Subpolar and Northern Urals - 1000 mm, Southern Urals - 650-750 mm.

Relative humidity: 60-70%.

Economy

Minerals: iron, copper, chromium, nickel, potassium salts, asbestos, coal, oil.
Industry: mining, iron and steel non-ferrous metallurgy, heavy engineering, chemical and petrochemical, fertilizer, electrical engineering.

hydroelectric power: Pavlovskaya, Yumaguzinskaya, Shirokovskaya, Iriklinskaya hydroelectric power stations.

Forestry.
Agriculture: crop production (wheat, rye, garden crops), animal husbandry (cattle, pig breeding).
traditional crafts: artistic processing of Ural gems, knitting of Orenburg downy shawls.

Service sector: tourism, transport, trade.

Attractions

■ Natural: Pechoro-Ilychsky, "Basegi", "Shulgan-Tash", steppe, Bashkir reserves, mineralogical reserve, caves Divya, Arakaevskaya, Sugomakskaya, Kungurskaya ice and Kapova, rocky outcrops of the Seven Brothers, Chertovo Gorodishche and Stone Tent, Bashkirsky national park, Yugyd Va National Park (Komi Republic), Hoffmann Glacier (Saber Ridge), Azov Mountain, Alikaev Kamen, Deer Streams Natural Park, Blue Mountains Pass, Revun Rapids (Iset River), Zhigalansky Waterfalls (Zhigalan River), Aleksandrovskaya Sopka, Taganay National Park, Ustinovsky Canyon, Gumerovskoye Gorge, Red Key Spring, Sterlitamak Shikhans, Krasnaya Krucha.

Curious facts

■ The peoples of the Urals still use the names of the Urals in their languages: Mansi - Ner, Khanty - Kev, Komi - Iz, Nenets - Pe or Igarka Pe. In all languages ​​it means the same thing - "stone". Among the Russians who have long lived in the north of the Urals, a tradition has also been preserved to call these mountains Kamen.
■ The bowls of the St. Petersburg Hermitage were made from Ural malachite and jasper, as well as interior decoration and the altar of the St. Petersburg Church of the Savior on Blood.
■ Scientists have not yet found an explanation for the mysterious natural phenomenon: the Ural lakes Uvildy, Bolshoy Kisegach and Turgoyak have unusually clear water. In neighboring lakes, it is completely muddy.
■ The top of Mount Kachkanar is a collection of bizarrely shaped scapes, many of which have their own names. The most famous of them is Camel Rock.
■ In the past, the richest deposits of high-quality iron ore in the mountains of Magnitnaya, Vysoka and Blagodat, known throughout the world and listed in all textbooks on geology, are now either hidden or turned into quarries hundreds of meters deep.
■ The ethnographic appearance of the Urals was created by three streams of settlers: Russian Old Believers who fled here in the 17th-18th centuries, peasants transferred to the Ural factories from the European part of Russia (mainly from modern Tula and Ryazan regions) and Ukrainians, attracted as an additional labor force at the beginning of the 19th century.
■ In 1996, the Yugyd Va National Park, together with the Pechoro-Ilychsky Reserve, with which the park borders in the south, was included in the list of UNESCO World Natural Heritage Sites under the name “Virgin Komi Forests”.
■ Alikaev Stone - a 50-meter rock on the Ufa River. The second name of the rock is Maryin cliff. Here they filmed the TV movie "Shadows disappear at noon" - about life in the Ural outback. It was from the Alikaev stone, according to the plot of the film, that the Menshikov brothers threw off the chairman of the collective farm, Marya Krasnaya. Since then, the stone has a second name - Maryin cliff.
■ The Zhigalan waterfalls on the Zhigalan River, on the eastern slope of the Kvarkush ridge, form a 550 m long cascade. With a river length of about 8 km, the elevation difference from source to mouth is almost 630 m.
■ Sugomak cave is the only cave in the Ural Mountains, 123 m long, formed in marble rock. There are only a few such caves on the territory of Russia.
■ The Krasny Klyuch spring is the most powerful water source in Russia and the second largest in the world after the Fontaine de Vaucluse spring in France. The water consumption of the Red Key spring is 14.88 m3/sec. Landmark of Bashkiria in the status of a hydrological monument of nature of federal significance.

The Ural Mountains are considered the oldest on earth, they stretch from north to south, dividing Russia into European and Asian parts. Mountains begin at the Arctic Ocean, cross the whole country and end in Kazakhstan.

If you look at the map, you can clearly see it.

The highest of these mountains is, which is located in the north and its height is almost 2 kilometers.

The width of the Ural Mountains in some areas reaches 150 km!

The existence of the Ural Mountains was known in ancient times, in particular, the Greeks believed that it was precisely behind these mountains that the legendary country of Hyperborea was located.

Geology of the Urals

The Ural Mountains were not always so low. Their formation began 350 million years ago and during their "youth" the Ural mountains reached a height of six kilometers. There was a time when volcanoes were active in the mountains, strong earthquakes shook all living things, and magma, pouring out, formed new ones. rocks.

Future mineral deposits were laid here. Millions of years have passed, there are no more crazy volcanoes, the mountains collapsed and became small, but sometimes the Ural Mountains remember the dawn of stormy youth and earthquakes occur. The last one happened in the fall of 2015.

Nature of the Urals

Throughout the mountain pass several natural areas- from the tundra in the north, the taiga in the middle and ending in the south with the steppe.

It turns out that both nature and animal world everywhere different.

If in the north you can meet a deer, then in the south you can meet a marmot or a ground squirrel. When tulips bloom in the steppe in the south, there are still bitter frosts in the north.

The mountain slopes are not steep, but they perfectly interfere with the winds, so the climate of the European part differs from the climate of the Asian part of the mountains, and that is why they attract tourists and skiers from all over the world to their slopes, being very popular.

Rocks of the Urals

In the bowels of the Urals, a lot of minerals are located and mined. Some of them are very rare and are found only in the bowels of the Ural Range. Among the most famous are:

• gold;
• silver;
• iron ore;
• copper ore;
• ornamental stones;
• oil;

Everyone knows crafts and jewelry made of malachite, a beautiful green Ural stone.

Products from it can be seen in the St. Petersburg Hermitage.

Many folk tales about the extraction of fossil wealth were processed by the storyteller Bazhov P.P.

The population of the Urals

Most of the population lives in large industrial cities. According to the national composition, these are mainly Russians. Next come the Tatars, Bashkirs, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Mansi, Khanty and other nationalities.

Industry of the Urals

In the Ural region, in particular on and, the most common industries are metallurgy and mechanical engineering. It is known that copper ore was mined here even before our era. The modern period of development of metallurgy began under Peter I, from the Demidov factories and mines.

The industrial cities of Chelyabinsk are known all over the world, the capital of the Southern Urals with its ChTPZ, and, as the capital of the Urals, with its Uralmash.

All cities in the region have rail, road and air links.

The only negative is that a highly developed industry pollutes the atmosphere and adversely affects people's health.

However, this does not stop those who know that the Ural Mountains are natural and want to plunge into this atmosphere.

Fascinating travels and excursions to the Ural Mountains.

How the Ural Mountains were born

The Urals on Earth is a unique phenomenon.

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

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

And climatic diversity.

Indeed, where else can you find such a region, where the head would be cooled by the age-old ice of the Northern Ocean, and the foot would be burned by the calcined sands of the desert? A land where, on the same June day, the never-setting sun shines over the blooming polar tundra and the forbs of alpine meadows spread luxuriously. Where you can hunt to your heart’s content in cedar forests or, after admiring the slender choirs of elegant birch pegs, stop at the Bashkir nomad camp, drink plenty of chilled koumiss, while watching how everything around vibrates 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 such an unusual natural creation appeared on the body of the planet, what forces erected it. Therefore, a small digression into the science that studies the Earth is inevitable - into geology.

What modern science defines the concept of "Ural"?

Strictly speaking, the Urals is a mountainous country with areas of 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, but it stretches from the Aral deserts to the Arctic Ocean for more than two and a half thousand kilometers. In this way, it is similar to 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, or something, than their illustrious counterparts somewhere in the Alps or the Himalayas.

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

The Urals is world famous for the richness and diversity of its geological structure. This is an irrefutable truth. But it is necessary to realize the significance of this fact to the most subtle shade - 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 mess of uneven-aged and diverse geological formations!

But that's not all.

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

All this - and the diversity that strikes the imagination of even sophisticated professionals, and the abundance of subsoil treasures, and their unprecedented uneven age - all this 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 was here…” Historians claim that the Russian Geological Committee, created by the tsar’s order more than a hundred years ago, was and was established mainly so that pundits could finally decide on this natural turmoil, called the Urals…

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

To list all the created hypotheses for the formation of the Urals is not an exercise for short essay. An extensive monograph is needed here. After all, the contradictory nature of a thousand times certified and rechecked observations has formed an incredible kaleidoscope of facts. The researchers had to logically link the obvious reality of finding the most heterogeneous deposits literally next to each other. And the siliceous platy fragments of the formations of the bottom of the ocean, which raged here three hundred to four hundred million years ago, now crushing underfoot. And boulder ridges brought deep into the ancient continent by glacial massifs hundreds of thousands of years ago. And outcrops of rocks of the granite or gabbro series, now being destroyed by winds and the sun, but which could form only at many kilometers deep on the earth, in the gloomy crucible of thousand-degree temperatures and thousands of atmospheric pressures prevailing there. And sandy spits of river deposits that washed here more than one million tons of sand and pebbles from collapsing mountains ...

So to this day, all this allows dozens of the most diverse assumptions to exist simultaneously on an equal footing about how the Earth lived within the Urals throughout its entire billion-year history. To this day, deciphering its true history is an urgent and most difficult problem for geologists.

True, today scientists have decided at least on 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 according to their relation to the original substance of the planet Earth.

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

Proponents of a different approach argue that all planets (the Earth, of course, is no exception for them) are fragments of protomatter formed as a result of its explosive expansion, that is, in their opinion, there is a process of decompacting the matter of the Universe. The great Lomonosov did not deny such a view; many leading geologists and cosmologists of the world and our country now adhere to it ...

And their conviction is understandable. Astronomers have established: going to the Earth, light from all visible stars shifts to the red part of the spectrum. And there is only one satisfactory explanation for this - all the stars scatter from a certain center. This is a consequence of the decompression of the matter 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 were found whose age is defined as at least three billion years old. And the whole “tragedy” for supporters of hypotheses is that this established fact can be 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 pictures are also offered here. Supporters of the “shrinking” Earth believe that all this time the Urals behaved like an oscillating string (of course, slowly oscillating and, of course, a huge string), - it either rose to the heavens, grinning at the rocky peaks of the mountains, then descended, bending towards the earth’s center, and then - over the entire space of the depression - it was flooded with oceanic swells. Naturally, these oscillations were not so simple, consistent and unidirectional. During them, there were also chips, and breaks in the earth's firmament, and the crushing of its individual sections in the corrugation of folds, and the formation of cracks of different depths. Water rushed from above and below into the gaping cracks, streams of red-hot lava burst out of the bowels of the earth, and clouds of volcanic ash covered the sky and the sun, belching from the vents of fire-breathing volcanoes. There are many deposits of this type in the Urals.

Globe of Martin Beheim (1492)

During the rise of sections of the Urals, ruins of crushed stone, pebbles, and sand usually form on them. During subsidence, the rivers carried the destroyed material into the oceans and seas, filling their coastal zones with clay, silt, and sand. Dying microorganisms created kilometers 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.

Supporters of the "separating" universe believe that the Earth expanded in leaps and bounds. The picture of the formation of the Urals is drawn by him like this. At 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, slowly, as if in an ice drift, crawled across 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 up with puffing gases, the molten substance of the deep bowels. From there to earth's surface huge masses of salty waters of future oceans and seas formed during the same process of decompression also splashed out. So it was in the places of modern oceans.

The Ural was formed in this way. The fragments of the ancient continents, moving away from each other along the roundness of our planet, on the other hand, inevitably had to approach some other fragment, also from the previously intact piece of land. This is how Europe, which had broken away from something, and Asia, which had broken off from somewhere, began to draw closer. When colliding, the edges of the approaching fragments began to crumble, crumple, and prick. Some pieces of the approaching continents were squeezed out onto the surface of the Earth, some were crushed inward, crumpled into folds. From gigantic pressure, something melted, something delami- nated , something completely changed its original appearance. A monstrous hodgepodge of the most heterogeneous formations was formed, which geologists inclined to humor 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, according to the authors of this idea, happened quite a long time ago, more than one hundred million years ago. But one should not think that it was last act expansion of our planet. Geologists believe that the faults of the earth's crust within the Urals have occurred more than once since then. One of the latest events of this kind, they consider the formation of a split in the Southern Urals, stretching in a line from Bredy through Troitsk to Kopeisk. Here, according to enthusiasts of the idea, there is the birth of such a fissure of the earth's firmament, which can grow to the size of Atlantic Ocean. She is just at the very beginning of this glorious journey. The next stage they see is the formation of a giant basin like Baikal - somewhere in a hundred thousand years, then the sprawling shores of the emerging sea (like the Red Sea) - in another two or three hundred thousand years, and then a direct path to the new Great Ocean. It would be interesting to see...

The places of collisions of the continents are also riddled 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 easily explained...

No matter how they appear on the body of the planet, but the Ural Mountains for the last few tens of millions of years have invariably risen on the border of two continents, open in winter and summer to all winds, rains, snows, calcined by the sun, frozen by frosty winters. All natural elements contributed to the destruction of the once majestic ranges. The tops of the mountains gradually collapsed, crumbled into countless fragments of small and large boulders, became lower, rounder. So they gradually turned into what we are seeing today - into a community of several closely attached to each other, not too high and not too rocky chains of mountain ranges, mostly elongated 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 the central part of it, they are significantly lowered, in some places they are just high, portly 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 asymmetric. It passes into the Russian Plain as if smoothly, as a series of gradually lowering western foothills. Its transition to the West Siberian lowland is more abrupt. In a significant part of the Urals, it looks like this: mountains, mountains, mountains, a cliff - and immediately a 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 cooling appeared on the planet. They are quite fully traced throughout the Ural Mountains, and manifested themselves in the change of vegetation and species composition of the animal world. The cooling of the planet led to its glaciation. But an amusing 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 at the time of the deepest glaciation, they did not penetrate south of the upper reaches of the Pechora.

Judging by fossil vegetation, the climate in the Urals was quite favorable until the last ice age. Here - almost along the entire length - then hop hornbeam (a tree of the Mediterranean climate, found in the Pechora River basin), oaks, lindens, hornbeams, and hazel grew. Shrubs were plentiful, and many spores and grass pollen were found. But during the period of glaciation, there was no trace left of the free forest-steppe woodland with vast open spaces. It was replaced by taiga coniferous forests, and luxurious herbs in large areas were replaced by quinoa and wormwood.

In pre-glacial times, the level of the World Ocean was one hundred and fifty to two hundred meters lower than today. On the shelves of the modern northern seas in our time, many kilometers of once-deep valleys have been discovered, dug then in the earth's firmament by the Pechora and Ob. And Kama's bed 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 originated in them flowed faster. In general, mighty streams flowed down from the Urals then. Evidence of their power is now the placers 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 around Khanty-Mansiysk.

And the Ural rivers were much more watery.

Today, near the Cherry Mountains, the small river Khmelevka flows. 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 Cherry mountains, absorbing the valley of the current Gorkaya river, and flowed into the current lakes Big and Small Kochan and Ara-Kul. Then these lakes were one huge whole - the sea, and now mirrors of its waters have been preserved only in the deepest places of the ancient basin.

Apparently, it is not for nothing that the time of melting of the glaciers of the era of the largest glaciation of the Urals was called by specialists “the time of great waters”.

In general, periods of glaciation seriously affected the formation of the modern appearance of the Urals. And not only the Urals. Let me introduce you to one hydrographic incident that happened 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. The glaciers completely blocked and redrawn the hitherto familiar structure of river flows. So, the rivers of the Pechora basin began to flow into the Kama - through Vyatka. The glacier is an insurmountable wall under the pond and the waters of the ancient large river, which once flowed in the area between the present-day cities of Yuryevets and Vasilsursk. It flowed to the north and flowed into the Pra-Unzha, which then belonged to the Don basin. The dammed waters, constantly replenished by the melting glacier, overflowed the bowl of the reservoir that had arisen and, pouring out through the height of the watershed near present-day Kazan, poured into the streams of the Kama. Gradually, they completely cut through this watershed, forming a completely worthy river bed. This is how the great river Volga appeared.

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

Isn't it deeply symbolic that the streams of the Ural river Kama modestly and inconspicuously 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 weightily began to be personified by the power of Russia ...

Since the time of the first great glaciation of the Urals, all of its main climatic and landscape zones have appeared to this day - tundra (bald), mountain-taiga, taiga-plain, forest-steppe and steppe.

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

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Part I. Ural peoples: initial information ethnic

The Ural Mountains, also called the "Stone Belt of the Urals", are represented by a mountain system surrounded by two plains (East European and West Siberian). These ranges function as a natural barrier between Asian and European territory, and are among the oldest mountains in the world. Their composition is represented by several parts - polar, southern, subpolar, northern and middle.

Ural Mountains: where are they located

feature geographical location of this system is considered to be the extent from the northern to the southern direction. Hills adorn the mainland of Eurasia, mainly covering two countries - Russia and Kazakhstan. Part of the array is spread in the Arkhangelsk, Sverdlovsk, Orenburg, Chelyabinsk regions, the Perm Territory, Bashkortostan. The coordinates of the natural object - the mountains run parallel to the 60th meridian.

The length of this mountain range is more than 2500 km, and the absolute height of the main peak is 1895 m. The average height of the Ural mountains is 1300-1400 m.

The highest peaks of the array include:

The highest point is located on the border separating the Republic of Komi and the territory of Yugra (Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug).

The Ural Mountains reach the shores belonging to the Arctic Ocean, then hide under water for some distance, continue on Vaigach and the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. Thus, the massif extended northward for another 800 km. The maximum width of the "Stone Belt" is about 200 km. In some places it narrows to 50 km or more.

Origin story

Geologists say that the Ural Mountains have a complex way of origin, as evidenced by the variety of rocks in their structure. Mountain ranges are associated with the era of the Hercynian folding (late Paleozoic), and their age reaches 600,000,000 years.

The system was formed as a result of the collision of two huge plates. The beginning of these events was preceded by a gap in the earth's crust, after the expansion of which an ocean was formed, which disappeared over time.

Researchers believe that the distant ancestors of the modern system have undergone significant changes over the course of many millions of years. Today, a stable situation prevails in the Ural Mountains, and there are no significant movements from the earth's crust. The last strong earthquake (with a power of about 7 points) occurred in 1914.

Nature and wealth of the "Stone Belt"

Staying in the Ural Mountains, you can admire impressive views, visit various caves, swim in lake water, experience adrenaline emotions, going down along the flow of raging rivers. It is convenient to travel here in any way - by private cars, buses or on foot.

The fauna of the "Stone Belt" is diverse. In places where spruce grows, it is represented by squirrels that feed on seeds. coniferous trees. After the arrival of winter, red animals feed on self-prepared supplies (mushrooms, pine nuts). Martens are found in abundance in the mountain forests. These predators settle nearby with squirrels and periodically hunt for them.

The ridges of the Ural Mountains are rich in furs. Unlike the dark Siberian counterparts, the sables of the Urals have a reddish color. The hunting of these animals is prohibited by law, which allows them to freely breed in the mountain forests. In the Ural Mountains there is enough space for wolves, elks, and bears to live. The mixed forest zone is a favorite place for roe deer. Foxes and hares live on the plains.

The Ural Mountains hide a variety of minerals in the bowels. Hills are fraught with asbestos, platinum, gold deposits. There are also deposits of gems, gold and malachite.

Climate characteristic

Most of the Ural mountain system covers the zone temperate climate. If in the summer season you move along the perimeter of the mountains from the north to the south, you can record that the temperature indicators begin to increase. In summer, the temperature fluctuates at +10-12 degrees in the north and +20 in the south. AT winter time years, the temperature indicators acquire less contrast. With the onset of January, northern thermometers show about -20 ° C, in the south - from -16 to -18 degrees.

The climate of the Urals is closely related to the air currents arriving from the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the precipitation (up to 800 mm during the year) permeates the western slopes. In the eastern part, such indicators decrease to 400-500 mm. In winter, this zone of the mountain system is under the influence of an anticyclone coming from Siberia. In the south, in autumn and winter, one should count on cloudy and cold weather.

Fluctuations typical of the local climate are largely due to the mountainous terrain. With increasing altitude, the weather becomes more severe, and temperature indicators vary significantly in different parts of the slopes.

Description of local attractions

The Ural Mountains can be proud of many sights:

1. Deer Streams Park.
2. Reserve "Rezhevskoy".
3. Kungur cave.
4. An ice fountain located in the Zyuratkul park.
5. "Bazhov places".

Deer Streams Park located in the city of Nizhniye Sergi. lovers ancient history the local Pisanitsa rock, dotted with drawings of ancient artists, will become interesting. Other prominent places in this park are the caves and the Big Pit. Here you can walk along special paths, visit observation platforms, and cross to the right place by cable car.

Reserve "Rezhevskoy" attracts all connoisseurs of gems. This protected area contains deposits of precious and semi-precious stones. It is forbidden to walk here on your own - you can stay on the territory of the reserve only under the supervision of employees.

The territory of the reserve is crossed by the river Rezh. On its right bank is the Shaitan-stone. Many Urals consider it magical, helping in solving problems. various problems. That is why people who want to fulfill their dreams are constantly coming to the stone.

Length Kungur ice cave- about 6 kilometers, of which tourists can visit only a quarter. In it you can see numerous lakes, grottoes, stalactites and stalagmites. To enhance the visual effects, there is a special backlight. The cave owes its name to the constant sub-zero temperature. To enjoy the local beauties, you need to have winter things with you.

From the Zyuratkul National Park, located near the city of Satka Chelyabinsk region, arose due to the appearance of a geological well. It is worth looking at only in winter. During the frosty season, this underground fountain freezes and takes the form of a 14-meter icicle.

Park "Bazhovskie Places" associated with the famous and beloved by many book "Malachite Box". In this place, full-fledged conditions for vacationers are created. You can go on an exciting walk on foot, by bike, on horseback, while admiring the picturesque landscapes.

Anyone can cool off here in the lake waters or climb the Markov stone hill. In the summer season, numerous extreme sports enthusiasts come to Bazhovskie Places in order to descend along the mountain rivers. In winter, you can experience just as much adrenaline in the park while walking on a snowmobile.

Recreation centers in the Urals

All the necessary conditions have been created for visitors to the Ural Mountains. Recreation centers are located in places remote from noisy civilization, in quiet corners of pristine nature, often on the shores of local lakes. Depending on personal preferences, here you can stay in complexes with modern design or in antique buildings. In any case, travelers are waiting for comfort and polite, caring staff.

The bases provide rental of cross-country and alpine skis, kayaks, tubing, snowmobile trips with an experienced driver are available. On the territory of the guest zone there are traditionally located barbecue areas, a Russian bath with billiards, children's play houses and playgrounds. In such places, you can definitely forget about the bustle of the city, and fully relax on your own or with the whole family, taking unforgettable photos for memory.

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