#kuqa

KUQA grand canyon.

Two fragments of murals Central Asia, 6th-7th century

Tian Shan Front Range

These sedimentary rocks sit on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, a block of low-lying crust in western China surrounded by the mountains of the Himalayan Orogeny. The area is a desert in part because of the surrounding mountains; moisture from the oceans is blocked on the other sides of the range.

These rocks are sediments eroded from the nearby Tian Shan Mountains, which sit at the northern end of the Taklamakan Desert. As the mountains are rising, the range erodes and sheds sediment into the basin, creating the flat-lying rocks in the first picture. As you drive along the road near the city of Kuqa, the rocks shift from flat lying to steeply tilting, as seen in the latter 2 pictures. This type of behavior is common along the edge of growing mountain ranges; as the mountains grow, the faults that form the mountains break out into the basin. The younger ridges are formed out of the sediments previously eroded out of the mountain range.

-JBB