The swamps of Russia. The largest swamp in Russia

The swamp. Hearing this word, many feel an inexplicable fear. It is terrible to imagine how many lives were swallowed up by the dark swamps covered with fogs. From time to time they sparkle with self-igniting gas. How can you not believe that there live kikimors, female criminals and other evil spirits? The swamps of Russia are a special topic. They are found all over our vast country. And there are many legends in the people. We will consider places with standing water (they are low-lying, transitional, riding) from different angles.

Secret collection of cranberries

Marshes of Russia, Mother Russia: raw, stale air, an abundance of bloodsuckers of mosquitoes, flies. In the old days it was considered: this is a place to communicate with evil forces. From the traditions it is known that people who from the clan to the clan received secret knowledge from the ancestors (vedennes, healers), retired to bear angles for carrying out magical rituals. Perhaps it was so. There is another opinion that sorcerers here were engaged in collecting medicinal plants. As is known, there are a lot of them in the marshes: Ledum, cranberry, cloudberry, hops, string and others.

Many can hardly imagine: how can you build a house in a ruinous place? But the brave ones were. They chose scraps of dry land, erected a dwelling and spent years munching on game and berry. The reasons for departing from the world were often explained very prosaically: some hermits hid from the enemy, others - from the prosecution of the guards of order. Pathways to the owners knew only the elite.

Mentally going through all of Russia (for example, from the borders with the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus to the peninsula of Kamchatka), we find: bogs are found everywhere. A favorable environment for their occurrence is the increased moisture content in the air and the shallow occurrence of underground rivers (groundwater). Such characteristics are high and moderate latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.

One of the hundred wonders of Russia

The rivers of Eastern Siberia and the Far East at the mouths are very marshy. Lethal spaces are rich in tundra, where the permafrost layers interfere with moisture soak the soil. The swamps in the north of Russia are impressive.

Western Siberia is called the most swamped area in the world. Just imagine the scale: over 570 kilometers they stretch from the north to the south and more than 300 kilometers from the west to the east. On the Vasyugan plain, between the Ob and Irtysh rivers there are Vasyugan marshes. They are listed in the "Hundred Wonders of Russia". Their area is 53 thousand square meters. Km (more than the territory of some European countries).

But no matter how marshes seem unsuitable for human life, they have colossal ecological significance for the regions, since they perform biospheric functions (accumulative, biological, intercircular).

Helped the Ice Age

The square of the distribution of West Siberian bogs is huge: 1.7 thousand kilometers from north to south and the same from west to east (with occasional breaks). More than a quarter of the world's peat deposits are concentrated here. The heavily waterlogged regions of the European part include Karelia (30% of the territory, in some places up to 70%) and the Kola Peninsula.

Before the swamps were formed (Russia, as we have already understood, they do not occupy), the glaciers worked well over the terrain, creating a landscape of hills alternating with lowlands (all this is the bottom of the ancient sea). Dampening began about ten to twelve thousand years ago. If you look from a bird's eye view, it seems that the fragile spaces are weaved into an unusual lace, connecting with each other by peat channels.

The connection was as follows: the scattered relief depressions were gradually filled with dense remains of decayed plants, and crawled out from there, like a dough from a pan, merging with each other. This type of bog was called Karelian.

Rjamy and zaimki

Large massifs of the forest marsh are already two and a half thousand years old. And today they expand, occupying territories of interfluves, river terraces and flood plains. The names of these places in the old days came up with a lot.

Take, for example, the rims rounded or slightly oval, overgrown with shrubs and forests. There are many of them in the taiga areas in the south of Western Siberia. They diverge in a fan-like manner, with stripes of different widths (from 100 meters to many kilometers). Thanks to the connection points, the branches form extensive systems.

At many on hearing and such name as заемщеще. Often so called swamps, overgrown with reeds. The forests and swamps of Russia are closely interrelated. There are swamps in the deaf often. In the people - tesan. The swamp forest on the plain is yudal. The extreme stage of swamping is the golya.

The lake will become a swamp

The West Siberian swamps contain huge reserves of water, numbering almost a thousand cubic kilometers. Mighty Ob for the year makes in the Kara Sea in 2,5 times less! It is not surprising that peat bogs grow from year to year. The Vasyugan marshes are huge, but there are other large bogs in Russia: the Tyuguryuk (Altai), the Great (Vologda) and others.

There are many lakes in our country. Nearly three million closed-water reservoirs. The deepest lake is Baikal (1620 meters). Even in the USSR, every schoolboy knew: it contains half of our fresh water supplies. There are uneven lakes.

It depends on a number of factors. First, from the geological structure. But the relief, the climate, at what distance from the surface of the earth there are groundwaters, etc. are also important. Where the climate is arid, the number of lakes is smaller. Bottomless lakes are filled with soil particles, become shallow. If you do not take care of them, they can become the very places where the kikimors live. Although, it would seem, how are the lakes and swamps of Russia connected (and not only it)?

Many researchers say that the fate of the swamp lies in wait for the Volga River, whose speed after the construction of the cascade of hydroelectric power stations (and other technogenic causes) has slowed down sharply, self-cleaning has been disrupted. If the trouble touched one of the greatest blue arteries of the Earth, then one can imagine the fate of smaller rivers and lakes. As we already know, the existing bogs (swamps) of Russia were also formed gradually.

The Amur region is in the lead

To the east of the Yenisei-priest the marshes are not so many anymore. Eastern Siberia is covered only by ten percent. The most plots are lowlands along the valleys (including the Central Yakutia, the extensive wetlands of the Indigirskaya and Severo-Sibirskaya plains, at the base of which lies the Khatangskaya depression). Affected by many years of frost. Due to low temperatures humus (peat) is formed and accumulates extremely slowly. The thickness of the existing layer is only one meter, although there are places where it reaches up to 5 meters. This is the legacy of those periods when the climate was warm.

In the Far East, bogs also gravitate toward floodplains of large rivers. The Amur Region is the leader (there they are concentrated to 36 percent). The fifth part of the swamps is impassable at all. There are stilts: at the top is a layer of peat, and beneath them are pools of water. Kamchatka (especially the Okhotsk coast) and Sakhalin are considered wetlands.