Located at Zhangye Danxia Landform Geological Park in Gansu Province, this is mother nature at its most colourful. Over 24 million years ago these mountains formed in China by laying down mineral deposits over and over agin. The colors pop most after a good steady rain, but look pretty spectacular all of the time. As a new UNESCO World Heritage Site, Danxia is become far more popular these days than it was just a few decades ago, with tourists drawn to the remarkable forms of the mountains here. Does Danxia really look like the photo below in real life? How did Danxia come to be, in the geological sense? Here's the story, as I understand it , Over millions of years, layers of different types of rock ,including red sandstone and a whole lot of mineral deposits—formed on top of one another. Normal so far. But then, 40 or 50 million years ago, gigantic force of tectonic plates forced an island,the future India into a collision course with the rest of Eurasia.The catastrophic impact took place in slow motion Over 50 million years, India moving at about 27 feet per centurycrushed into the larger continent, creating rifts of fractured rock and creating mountain ranges like the Himalayas. Over in the future Chinese province of Gansu, the collision disrupted the layer cake of red rock and minerals, too. Imagine a piece of paper with lines drawn on it then imagine crumpling it up. The "rainbow" patterns we see at Danxia are the result of a similar crumpling, which explains their perfect striation. Danxia was mapped by Chinese archaeologists in the 1920s and 30s, and it remained relatively unknown outside of the region but that's quickly changing. It received protection as a UNESCO heritage site in 2009, and though Gansu is landlocked and lesser populated than more easterly provinces, it hasn't been immune to the rapid development of its neighbors, either and the boom in tourism reflects that.
It is quite unbelievable to believe something as beautiful as this still exists
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