Showing posts with label stone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stone. Show all posts

Big Stone River, Russia

The Big Stone River is a chaotic jumble of huge boulders flowing down the slope of the Taganay mountains in the Southern Urals, on the territory of Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. The river of stone is 6 km long and averages 200 meters in width. Parts of it are 700 meters wide.

The gigantic rock slide is believed to have occurred during the last glaciation some 10,000 years ago. At that time, glaciers covered the top of the ridges of the Taganay mountains reaching heights up to 4,800 meters. Under the immense weight of this ice, the top of the mountain was pulverized into millions of large boulders. When the ice melted away, these rocks slowly slide down the hill creating the Big Stone River. The geological feature is named “river” only because it resembles as such, not because it actually flows. The rock slide has been sitting motionless for thousands of years.

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Photo credit: kucha.dirty.ru

The Carnac Stone Alignments

Out of hundreds of megalithic sites across Europe, only a few has achieved popularity, such as the Stonehenge. But other sites are no less intriguing. One that you might have never heard of is located in the village of Carnac, in Brittany, on the north-west coast of France. Here, set in the open fields are more than 3,000 standing stones arranged in long rows of parallel lines, called “alignments”, some of which stretch for several hundred meters. Believed to have erected during the Neolithic period, probably around 3300 BC, it is the largest megalithic site in the world.

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An Emperor’s War Diary Carved in Stone

In the beginning of the 2nd century, the Roman Emperor Trajan led two very successful war campaigns against the powerful Dacia kingdom by the river Danube in what is now Romania. The Dacians were a constant threat to the Roman Empire since the days of Caesar. Two decades earlier, after a savage pillaging of a Roman settlement and the humiliating defeat of Trajan’s predecessor, the Romans tried peace negotiation with the Dacians. When that failed the new Emperor Trajan led tens of thousands of Roman troops across the Danube River over a massive bridge that was constructed for the invasion, and defeated the barbaric empire on its home turf twice.

The victory over Dacia was the defining event of Trajan’s 19-year rule. The conquest brought back a staggering amount of loot in the form of gold that helped finance Rome’s further expansion campaign. By the time Trajan died, the Roman empire attained its maximum territorial extent in history.

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Photo credit: arts.st-andrews.ac.uk

The Mysterious London Stone

Embedded in the wall of 111 Cannon Street, in the City of London, just above the sidewalk, is a small grilled window that appears like a decorative skylight for an underground basement. Behind it, in a glass enclosure and dimly lit from inside, is an irregular chunk of oolitic limestone, believed to be one of London’s most ancient and important relic. But nobody remembers what it was used for.

Ignored by the thousands of Londoners who walk past the grilled window every day, the London Stone has stood in or around the same spot on present-day Cannon Street for at least a thousand years, and possibly even two. The stone’s mysterious origin has fascinated people for centuries and even appeared in the works of Shakespeare, William Blake and Dickens.

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Photo credit: www.thehistoryblog.com