Karst landform is a landform formed by the dissolution and sedimentation of soluble rocks by groundwater and surface water, erosion and sedimentation, and gravity collapse, collapse and accumulation. Named after Slovenian karst plateau, it is also called karst landform in China, and it is one of the five major modeling landforms in China.
karst landform
Karst landforms are divided into two categories: surface and underground. There are stone buds and karst gullies, karst funnels, sinkholes, karst depressions, karst basins and karst plains, peak clusters, peak forests and solitary peaks on the surface. There are caves, underground rivers and dark lakes underground.
Karst landforms are most widely distributed in China, mainly in Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan and other provinces, and also in parts of Sichuan, Chongqing, Hunan, Shanxi, Gansu, Tibet and other provinces. In other parts of the world, karst landforms are mainly distributed in Dinara Mountain in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the central plateau in France, the Urals Mountain in Russia, southern Australia, the central and eastern United States, the Greater Antilles and central and northern Vietnam.
China is the first country in the world to record and study karst landforms. As early as the Song and Ming Dynasties, Wang Shouren and Song Yingxing had an accurate description of limestone karst landforms. Especially in Song Dynasty, the redeposition mechanism of karst and travertine was studied and described in a pioneering way. However, the Travels of Xu Xiake written by Xu Hongzu (1586- 164 1) in Ming Dynasty is the most detailed.
The development of karst landform is closely related to the groundwater level, which changes with the local river surface or sea level, so the river surface or sea level is the erosion base of karst landform. In another sense, the floor of soluble rock is the datum of underground karst. Under the influence of erosion cycle theory, the evolution model of karst landform is basically a qualitative 3-4 stage model, which comes from the early models of Grande, Yakus and Williams.