Fenglinxia - Qinglongxia Science Tour Route

The geological, natural and human attractions distributed on this route mainly include Longmen Waterfall, Peak Wall, Peak Forest, Tengli Bridge, Barrier Valley, Calcified Body, Stacked Limestone, Liduishan, and Peninsular Headland.

1、Weiyuanhu

It is located in the upstream of Dasha River at the junction of Yu and Jin, and is a deep canyon formed in the Quaternary period and blocked by artificially, controlling a watershed area of 165 square kilometers, with a width of 52 meters at the bottom of the dam, 4.5 meters at the top, 120 meters long and 100.5 meters high, which is the highest masonry dam in the world. Climbing up and overlooking, the blue water of Weiyuan Lake winds along the valley, the cliffs on both sides face each other, peaks and forests tower, stone walls out of the shrinkage, strange rocks, a high gorge and flat lake scenery.

2、Liduishan

The hill isolated in the deeply curved river valley is the product of the river cut and straightened. The isolated hill located in the center of Weiyuan Lake forms a lake-centered island, consisting of Cambrian upper dolomite. Surrounded by water on three sides and connected to the lake shore on one side, the concave part between the isolated island and the mountain is a pile of river pebbles, which is a product of the ancient river channel.

3、Peak Forest

Peak forest is a proper name of karstology, including tower karst and cone karst. It is a major attraction of natural scenery tourism because of its upright form and aesthetic meaning. The park's mountainous karst landscape is dominated by peaks, but the two shores of Weiyuan Lake are mainly manifested as peaks and forests, with strange peaks standing up, anthropomorphic like objects, constituting a beautiful scenery of the park.

4、Peak wall column screen

Due to the inherent solubility of carbonate rocks, the tops of stone walls often appear as clusters of peaks, and the walls of peaks are arranged in parallel to form columns of screens, with one screen and one scene, and the walls change into scenery, constituting a unique geomorphic landscape here.

5、Peninsular headland

Headland was originally a special term for coastal landforms, i.e., a sharp-angled land extending into the sea or the lake. In the area of Weiyuan Lake, due to the very development of jointed fissures in the rocks, mutual outward shrinking stone walls are formed on both sides of the canyon, and after the water level is raised, these stone walls stick into the lake in the shape of a peninsula, which is called peninsula-shaped headland.

6、Hornblende fossil

Mollusca Cephalopoda, superorder Nautilus, pearlhornite. Fossils are the remains or relics of organisms preserved in the strata. It is the main basis for geologists to determine the age of strata. In the ancient sea more than 400 million years ago, there lived a carnivorous animal with a shell composed of calcareous or horny material, which is called hornblende because of the horn cone shape of the fossil formed. The hornblende fossil in this area is one of the main fossils in the Ordovician strata.

7、Algal reef

Algae are lower organisms containing chlorophyll and other pigments, and the algal reef here was formed by a combination of algal biological activity and sedimentation in the late Cambrian ocean about 490 million years ago. Since the growth rate of algae is much faster than the deposition rate, it is higher than the surrounding sediments of the same period, forming mound-like, Gangling-like and irregular shapes, etc., while carbonate rock debris was deposited between the algal hedges.

8、Stromatolite

It is also called stacked limestone, a kind of limestone with stacked structure formed by blue-green algae group. It has a fine grainy layer inside and is in the shape of a garden ring or irregular in the plane; in the section, it is in the shape of columns and palms of different sizes and parallel to each other. As the blue-green algal filaments secrete gelatinous mucus, they capture various floating chert particles and form light-colored chip-rich layers, while algal cells grow and spread on the surface of chip-rich layers, forming dark-colored algal-rich layers. The algae cells grow and spread on the surface of the chip-rich layer, forming a dark algae-rich layer.

9、Stacked waterfalls and caliche bodies

Nearly horizontally produced layered carbonate rocks are tectonically controlled and differentially eroded by flowing water, forming terraces and stacked waterfalls. At the same time, surface water containing abundant calcium carbonate components, due to the escape of carbon dioxide and evaporation of water, part of the calcium bicarbonate precipitated on the surface of the terrace, forming terrace-like calcium wads.

10、Karstcave

Caves are underground cavities formed by the dissolution and mechanical erosion of groundwater along the layers and fissures of rock layers. The two relatives' cave is an ancient karst cave formed in the Ordovician carbonate stratum. Due to the uplift of the mountain by the neotectonic movement, both sides of the ridge suffered from strong weathering and denudation, creating the unique landscape of the two relatives' cave through the ridge.

11、Basalt

The mallet rock is a typical tectonic denudation landscape in the park, geomorphologically called stone pillar or solitary peak, which towers over the top of the high mountain. With the different perspectives, it presents different shapes, a scene with many changes, step by step, the scene changes.

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