Geology Pictures of the Week, Jan. 24-30, 2010: China's Avatar Mountains

Panoramio ^ | Various

[cogitator]

If you've seen "Avatar", you know about the floating mountains. If you haven't seen it, there are floating mountains in the movie. While the physics and geology of these are, well, science-fictional, they are nonetheless impressive and picturesque in the movie.

Turns out that (minus the fact that they don't float) the mountains in Hunan province in China look a lot like the floating mountains in "Avatar" -- to the point that the Chinese have renamed one of them "Avatar Hallelujah Mountain". There are lots of pictures of that one (Google it), so I Panoramio-ed all over the region and grabbed several more. In the interests of bandwidth, I'm showing my five of my personal favorites here, and providing links to the rest. (Click for full-size, as always.)

I made up some of the link titles:

Natural Bridge

Spires

Misty Mountains

Sandstone pillars and peaks

Broad view with snow

Pillar (this may be the "Avatar Hallelujah Mountain")

Temple near Baofeng Lake

Three peaks

Mountain view

Sandstone walls

Blocky tops

Like a Chinese painting

[cogitator]

Haven't been here, but were I the possessor of an unlimited budget and unlimited free time, it'd be on my list.

[cogitator]

** ping **

[UCANSEE2]

Thank you for providing these pictures.

[Adams]

Very cool. Maybe that was inspiration for some of Roger Dean's work with Yes album cover art, and it looks like Roger Dean's art was inspriation for the movie.....

[gigster]

Roger Dean gave the albums of Yes their other-worldly looks,
and The Yes gave Roger Dean covers their other-worldly sounds.

[dr_lew]

Here's the Three Gorges Dam area from space on 1/25/2010, just above center in the image. What's that gray haze? It's a backwash from a sea of gray haze that covers the entirety of eastern China a good portion of the time, approaching half. A fact that is acknowledged but largely accepted or overlooked. I think it's outrageous.

[dr_lew]

Here's Eastern China this early AM 1/29/10, noonish their time.

Here's the roughly matching Google Earth view of the same area. Note Wuhan ( about 200 miles due east of Three Gorges ) on the lower left and the Yangtze River visible through the haze. Notice how the haze settles to a certain level, so that it fills the valleys and the mountains poke up through it.

[Ann Archy]

OMG!!! Those pics are GORGEOUS!!!!!

[CalvaryJohn]

The pollution’s pretty bad, though I’m sure most of it is water vapor. China has a wicked problem with heavy particulates, and I think Beijing is in a bowl like LA. Either way, they need to clean up their act. They are losing their farmland like we did in the 1930’s. They need to use scrubbers on their damn smokestacks.
I’m not an enviroweenie, but I sure do love the outdoors. China has some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet. I hope they manage to keep it that way.
Once again, look to the U.S. for the way to do it. We can burn coal cleanly. We can build safe nuke plants. We can harvest our resources without destroying everything; we’ve proven it. I sure wish we could convince our homegrown idiots of that. I would love to start exploiting our stuff at a huge pace and watch my country start growing again.

[geezerwheezer]

Beautiful photos. Thanks!