Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark
- UNESCO Global Geopark
Interesting facts
- The field gets only about 15 millimetres of rain a year, so wind, not water, does almost all of the sculpting.
- Two yardangs measured by scientists rise about 24 and 27 metres high, the larger stretching more than 110 metres in length.
- The word yardang comes from a Turkic term for a steep bank and entered English through the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin in 1903.
- The Chinese name for these landforms, yadan, was borrowed from the Uyghur form of the same Turkic word.
- The ridges are striped because hard, cemented lake layers alternate with softer wind-laid sediments that erode much faster.
- Prevailing winds here blow mainly from the north and the east, which is why the clay hulls line up like a parked fleet.
- In September 2015 Dunhuang was admitted to UNESCO's network of Global Geoparks.
- Similar wind-carved ridges exist on Mars, where single yardangs can run for tens of kilometres.
- Some geologists have suggested that Egypt's Great Sphinx began as a natural yardang that sculptors later reshaped.
Why it is worth it
Northwest of the old Jade Gate, where the Silk Road left China for the western deserts, wind has carved a dry lakebed into a fleet of clay ridges. Long, keel-shaped mounds stand in rows across the gravel plain, all pointing the same way, like ships moored in a sea that disappeared long ago. At dusk their shadows stretch across the desert and the place earns its local name, Devil City.
The formations are yardangs, landforms shaped by wind erosion. Here they are cut from layers of silty clay and fine silt laid down in lakes and rivers during the Middle and Late Pleistocene. Over hundreds of thousands of years, wind laden with sand and occasional floods have stripped away the softer layers and left the harder ones standing, so that each ridge is streamlined in the direction of the prevailing wind. The yardang field of Dunhuang is considered the largest in China; the geopark covers about 400 square kilometres, extending some 25 km from east to west and 18 km from north to south.
Many of the formations have been given names after their shapes, such as the Peacock, the Camel, the Stone Bird, the Mongolian Yurt and the Golden Lion Welcoming Guests. One group, known as the Ghost Town, has a cluster called Aisikexiaer, meaning old city in Uyghur, because from a distance its blocks look like the walls and towers of a ruined settlement. China's Ministry of Land and Resources approved the creation of the national geopark in November 2001.
Dunhuang, the oasis city that serves as the gateway, began as one of the frontier garrison towns founded under Emperor Wu of Han and became a crossroads of the Silk Road. It is best known for the Mogao Caves, about 25 km southeast of the city, where hundreds of Buddhist cave temples hold painted murals, and for the Crescent Lake and singing sand dunes within its oasis.
Getting there
The geopark lies in the Gobi desert in western Gansu province, northwest of the Yumen Pass; the nearest city, Dunhuang, is about 143 km away in a straight line, and the geopark is usually given as some 180 km from the town centre. The nearest airport is Dunhuang Mogao International Airport (DNH), about 154 km away. The ruins of the Yumen Pass, built in 111 BC, lie about 90 km northwest of Dunhuang in the same direction.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Dunhuang Yardang National Geopark (Chinese: ๆฆ็ ้ ไธนๅฝๅฎถๅฐ่ดจๅ ฌๅญ), officially Dunhuang UNESCO National Geopark (China), is a 2015 approved UNESCO national geopark in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China, that shows the Yardang geological feature of the area. Fully certified, the park must also be a member of the regional network, in this case the Asia Pacific Geoparks Network and the Global Geopark Network. Yardangs, the chief feature of geologic interest, were created over time by the soft part of the earth's surface being eroded by wind and rain, with the hard part of the rocks remaining in the desert.
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