Lena Pillars

Interesting facts

The limestone was laid down more than 500 million years ago, yet the pillars as landforms were carved only around 400,000 years ago.

Slow uplift of the Siberian Platform opened faults and deep river valleys, letting karst dissolution and frost weathering cut the rock into towers.

The park also protects tukulans, fields of wind-blown sand that form small patches of cold northern desert in the taiga.

Excavations at the mouth of the Diring-Yuryakh stream uncovered ancient stone tools and Late Neolithic burials from the second millennium BC.

Remains of woolly mammoth, steppe bison and woolly rhinoceros have been found within the protected area.

The pillars were inscribed as a World Heritage Site in July 2012 at a committee session held in Saint Petersburg, after a first bid failed in 2009.

The site was upgraded to the status of a Russian national park in August 2018.

The park records about 470 species of vascular plants, 42 species of mammals and 152 species of nesting birds.

Evenk communities continue to hunt and fish across large parts of the park under recognised traditional land use.

Decembrist writer Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, who knew Yakutia from his exile, wrote with rapture about the stillness surrounding the pillars.

Why it is worth it

The pillars along the Lena River are limestone, not granite, and that's the point — this rock records life from before there were skeletons to speak of. Formed and fractured by a climate swing of nearly 100 degrees Celsius between summer and winter, the 100-metre cliffs expose strata that hold roughly 350 of the roughly 2,000 known early Cambrian genera on Earth: calcified algae, cyanobacteria, the first stromatolites, the first calcified sponges, the first cnidarians. This is, in effect, a cross-section of the moment multicellular life first started building hard parts.

The single most striking layer is the Sinsk Biota, a reef ecosystem roughly ten million years older than Canada's famous Burgess Shale — and preserved by an unusual process called phosphatisation, which fossilises soft tissue in a level of detail that limestone rarely allows. Between the pillars themselves and this reef record, the site documents an almost continuous timeline: the diversification of the first skeletal animals, the appearance of the first metazoan reefs, right through to the first mass extinction of the Cambrian period. Few places on the planet let you read that transition in one rock face.

All of this sits in one of the most remote corners of Siberia, reachable in practice mainly by river in the short summer window, which is part of why a site this scientifically significant remains so lightly visited compared with its counterparts elsewhere.

Good to know

The pillars are reached mainly by boat along the Lena River from Yakutsk; access outside the short ice-free season is limited.

Best time to visit

June through August, when the river is navigable.

Getting there

162 km from Yakutsk. Platon Oyunsky Yakutsk International Airport (YKS) is about 169 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

The Lena Pillars are a natural rock formation along the banks of the Lena River in far eastern Siberia. The pillars are 150–300 metres (490–980 ft) high, and were formed in some of the Cambrian period sea-basins. The highest density of pillars is reached between the villages of Petrovskoye and Tit-Ary. The Lena Pillars Nature Park was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2012.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0