#transbaikal

Baikal - Zabaikalskaya Horse

Illustrated cards for the provinces of the Russian Empire (published in St. Petersburg 1856).  Each card presents an overview of the province's history, geography, culture and economics.  The front depicts distinguishing features such as rivers, mountains, and major cities and industries.  The back shows a map of the province, the provincial seal, information about the population, and a picture of the local dress of the inhabitants.

Chara Sands

This unique land form is found in the Transbaikal region (a.k.a. Zabayklsky Krai) of Siberia, Russia. Although it is commonly referred to as a desert, it technically does not meet the criteria for that title as, by many definitions of a desert, it has too much rainfall (approximately 35 cm/yr). This sandy terrain is only about 10 km by 4 km, however for such a small area it has large dune systems, some dunes upwards of 20 m, high in chains 100’s of metres long. These aren’t the only peculiarities of the Chara Sands, another is that there are no transition zones with the surrounding environments. From the sands you can step right into surrounding bogs and forest, which lead into the surrounding snowy mountains.

This sand is comprised of medium to fine grained quartz and potassium feldspar, with a bit of iron oxide giving an orange hue in parts. It is believed these materials were accumulated about anywhere from 70,000 to 20,000 years ago, during various stages of glaciation in the region. During this time large glaciers from the nearby Kodar Mountains were thought to have blocked the Chara River creating a glacial lake. A delta from an inflowing river could have caused deposition of sediments as it entered the lake, which later became the Chara Sands when the glaciers melted and the lake drained.

-JC

Image credit: NASA(https://commons.wikimedia.org/…/File:Chara_sands_2013_NASA.…) Aysa t(https://bit.ly/2KO5Q3w)

Sokhondo Nature Reserve (Siberia, Russia).

Established in 1973, this was the first ecological reserve in the former Chita Oblast.  It has a variety of steppe, forest and tundra ecosystems, and thus the vegetation and animal species are extremely diverse.

Surrounding the reserve, the landscape is mostly a steppe ecosystem. Within the reserve, a series of forest ecosystems replace each other as the altitude increases up to 2000m.  The summit of Sokhondo Mountain is a flat plain, strewn with large boulder concentrations called kurums.