Desert - Charskii sands

The Awakening comes from the feeling of falling and oppressive emptiness in my ears - the car goes іna landing. All the more rapid running towards an unexpected landscape: light-yellow sandy> specific surface, some stunted bushes, typical horny ridge dunes ... Desert? Perhaps the destination aerodrome has not taken the car, and the pilot brought it to Central Asia? Coming out of an airplane, you calm down - sturdy wooden construction with a double, triple glazed frames, dove edging coniferous forest on the horizon barren sand, tangled mass loaded with deer "Botalov (pogremka) on necks say it's Siberia. However, this can be guessed and not opening his eyes: wrists, neck and forehead are already feeling the itching and slight burning sensation. Familiar to all who visited at least once in the forest feeling - the midges! If we look carefully all around, then the majestic mountain walls, enclosing the valley, the facial features musher, cut and colors of his garments, fashion wear narrow knife on his belt and even the posture of deer, more slender than conventional reindeer can try to address more precisely: Mountain Yakutia, or somewhere nearby. It is. You are in the village of Char - Kodar center district of the Chita region - an area that lies at the junction of Yakutia, Buryatia, Chita, Irkutsk and Amur regions. Chara is in deep intermontane basin, one of a series of basins stretching among the rugged mountain taiga in the north-east of Lake Baikal. The climate of the basins did not softer than the surrounding mountains. It is here that the January frosts reach 50-60 °, in the chilly air, hear the "whisper" stars, and frost heave and the earth, caused by permafrost, which is called in textbooks "eternal", and in the scientific world more carefully - "many years" have almost the as widespread as in the foothills. In this part of Siberia are beginning to emerge winter anticyclones, chilling breath which goes far beyond the Urals, Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Summer continental climate, shows another side of the coin: the abundance of sun and heat, soil salinity and ripen in the open field cucumbers. This is also the Charskaya Basin. Seven months is kept minus the average temperature in January mercury drops sometimes up to -59 °. In July the same chartsy pulled on the golden shores of lakes - Enchantment oxbow of the river to the dark water in the heated shelter from the 30-degree heat. Dry air is filled with the pungent smell of wild rosemary, sand is clean and thin, slender pine directs the crown in the blue sky. Only the huge gray mountains with clouds above them milling so shrill feisty horse-fly bites Pout disabuse the Riga seaside. And within walking distance desert begins. Begins suddenly - a sharp transition from boron from larch, from peat bogs to sand. No transition zone, no "no man's land." You can stand with one foot in the desert, the other - in the taiga. Although Charskii sands associated proximity of permafrost and not very mobile, but on the border of traces of the offensive the desert: sand drifted helplessly inclined shaft to the waist, and then on the ranks of centenarians throat taiga giants. The surface of the desert unique. Letting sandy horns in the north-east, it is crossed by two-three-kilometer chain of dunes. Some of them reach for half a kilometer along the height of six-eight-house. In mezhbarhannyh depressions appear larch and erniki. Mostly desert cut by narrow, deep valleys of the tributaries of Enchantment. Sand is everywhere cockle wind ripples. Penetrating into the desert taiga elements create a contrasting combination. Perhaps it is these contrasts, the coexistence of cranberries, crowberry, blueberries on the wormwood and Oxytropis, neighborhood perevevaemyh sands with numerous glacial streams (permafrost at a depth of 0,2-0,3 m) and yellow dune, in combination with blue ice, frost, deer and Yakut Locusts - create a special "local flavor", the first thing catching the eye. But nature lovers who have visited Chara desert is still very small, and to recalculate the scientists somehow have affected it in their studies, enough fingers of one hand. The paucity of the first due less to the remoteness of the area as ignorance, and secondly - the need to address more pressing issues of the day: in a confining valley from the south-east ridge Udokan newly found rich reserves of copper. And prospectors rushing to give the new field "free pass", the desert, perhaps, the only obstacle on the caravan route, and not the object of study. So now only can say that Charskii sands - a unique phenomenon, probably a relic of the Late Glacial time. On the question of origin and future of the desert there is no clarity. Some see in the sands of a powerful proof of the Quaternary glaciation surrounding mountain ranges from the sand, as well as other materials, was handed down in the valley and, being lighter, is not deposited in the moraines, and on ancient Zandra. Others, pointing to cross-bedded sand Char, consider it the result of "work" Prachary - "grandmother" of the modern river. Tomorrow the desert (especially when targeted human impacts) can be transforming it into a first-class pine forest.