Loess Plateau

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Location of the Loess Plateau in China

The Loess Plateau , Loess Highlands ( Chinese  黃土高原 , Pinyin Huángtǔ gāoyuán ) or Loess Mountains in Huabei (Northern China) is a highland level that represents the transition from the North Chinese Lowlands to the Inner Mongolia Plateau in the north and the Tibetan Plateau in the west. The southern edge is formed by the loess areas in the river valley of the Yellow River and its most important tributary, the Wei He , which are dominated by the rocky mountain ranges of the Qin Ling in the south . The loess plateau extends approximately 1000 km east-west and 700 km north-south and largely includes the provinces of Shanxi and Shaanxi as well as parts of the provinces of Hebei , Henan , Gansu , Qinghai and Inner Mongolia . The loess layers in the mountainous regions of Henan, Shaanxi, Shanxi and Gansu are up to 300 m thick.

Loess dwellings near Yulin (North Shaanxi)

Traditionally, the residents of these areas have often worked their dwellings into the loess. The Löss apartments are characterized by an extremely pleasant, balanced room climate, which is able to mitigate the temperature extremes of cold winters and hot summers better than modern new buildings.

The loess is an aeolian sediment , which mainly consists of silt , a fine material blown out of the inner-Asian deserts and steppes . The solidified fly ash is yellow-brown and extremely rich in nutrients. The world's most powerful loess deposit layers are found in the East Asian Loess Mountains.

Loess landscape near Hunyuan ( Datong city ) in the Chinese province of Shanxi

Along the Yellow River, which gets its name from the sediments it carries with it, it stands in layers of up to 400 m. No other river in the world has a higher sediment load, almost 40 kilograms per cubic meter of water. Due to the sedimentation, the Yellow River increases its bed in the lowlands and has to be contained by ever higher dykes. At Kaifeng and Zhengzhou , the water level is already ten meters above the surrounding area.

literature

  • Z. Ding, J. Sun: Changes in sand content of loess deposits along a north-south transect of the Chinese Loess Plateau and the implications for desert variations . In: Quaternary Research , Vol. 52, 1999, pp. 56-62.
  • Henning Schoepke-Papst: Agriculture in the Chinese Loess Mountains . Hazard and protection . In: Cooperation partner , Volume 18, No. 11, 1988, pp. 28-29.
  • Hans-Rudolf Bork , Y. Li: 3200 years of relief development in the north Chinese loess plateau - the case study Zhongzuimao . In: Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen , Volume 146, No. 2, 2002, pp. 80–85.

See also

Web links