Swamp. Hearing this word, many feel inexplicable fear. It is terrible to imagine how many lives were swallowed by the dark swamps covered with fogs. From time to time they sparkle with the sparks of spontaneously igniting gas. How not to believe that there live kikimory, codorice and other evil spirits? Swamps of Russia is a special topic. They are found throughout our vast country. And there are many legends among the people. We will consider places with stagnant water (they are lowland, transitional, high) from different angles.
Secret Cranberry Harvest
Swamps of Russia, Mother Russia: raw, stale air, an abundance of bloodsuckers mosquitoes, horseflies. In the old days it was believed: this is a place for communication with evil spirits. From the legends it is known that people who received secret knowledge from ancestors from generation to generation (sorcerers, healers), retired to bear angles for magic rituals. Perhaps it was. There is also an opinion that sorcerers here were engaged in the collection of medicinal plants. As you know, there are many of them in the swamps: Ledum, cranberries, cloudberries, hops, a series of others.
It’s hard for many to imagine: how can you build a house in a disastrous place? But the brave men were. They picked shreds of dry earth, erected a dwelling, and while away the years, eating game and berries. The reasons for moving away from the world were often explained very prosaically: some hermits were hiding from enemies, others from pursuing law enforcement officers. Only a select few knew the paths to the owners.
Mentally walking all over Russia (for example, from the borders with the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus to the Kamchatka Peninsula), we find: swamps are found everywhere. A favorable environment for their occurrence is considered to be high moisture content in the air and shallow occurrence of underground rivers (groundwater). High and moderate latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere are distinguished by such characteristics.
One of the hundred wonders of Russia
The rivers of Eastern Siberia and the Far East at the mouths are very marshy. The tundra is rich in fatal spaces, where the permafrost layers prevent moisture from penetrating the soil. The swamps in the north of Russia are impressive.
Western Siberia is called the most swampy region of 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 as "One Hundred Wonders of Russia." Their area is 53 thousand square meters. km (more than the territory of some European states).
But no matter how unsuitable for human life the swamps may seem, they have tremendous environmental significance for the regions, since they perform biospheric functions (accumulative, biological, intercircular).
Ice Age Helped
The distribution square of the West Siberian swamps is huge: 1.7 thousand kilometers from north to south and the same from west to east (with rare interruptions). Over a quarter of the world's peat deposits are concentrated here. Karelia (30% percent of the territory, in some places up to 70%) and the Kola Peninsula are classified as highly boggy regions of the European part.
Before the swamps formed (Russia, as we already understood, did not occupy them), glaciers did a good job of the terrain, creating a landscape of hills alternating with lowlands (all this is the bottom of the ancient sea). Waterlogging began about ten to twelve thousand years ago. Seen from a bird's eye view, it seems that unsteady spaces are interwoven into an unusual lace, connecting with each other by peat channels.
The connection was as follows: the scattered depressions of the relief were gradually filled with dense remains of decayed plants, and crawled out from there, like dough from a pan, merging with each other. This type of swamp is called Karelian.
Rims and habits
Large massifs of swamps of the forest land have been two and a half thousand years old. And today they are expanding, occupying the territory of interfluves, river terraces and floodplains. Names of these places in the old days came up with a lot.
Take, for example, ryam rounded or slightly oval, overgrown with shrubs and forests. There are many of them in taiga regions in the south of Western Siberia. They diverge fan-shaped, in stripes of different widths (from 100 meters to many kilometers). Thanks to the connection points, the branches form vast systems.
Many have heard a name like a loan. This is often called the swamp covered with reeds. Forests and swamps of Russia are closely interconnected. There are swamps in the deaf more often. Among the people - a hemp. Swamp forest on the plain - yudal. The extreme stage of waterlogging is the boil.
The lake will become a swamp
West Siberian swamps contain huge reserves of water, amounting to almost a thousand cubic kilometers. The mighty Ob brings out 2.5 times less to the Kara Sea in a year! It is not surprising that peatlands grow from year to year. Vasyugan swamps are huge, but there are other large swamps in Russia: Tyuguryuk (Altai), Great (Vologda) and others.
There are many lakes in our country. There are almost three million enclosed bodies of water. The deepest lake Baikal (1620 meters). Even under the USSR, every schoolchild knew: it contains half of our fresh water reserves. The lakes are distributed unevenly.
It depends on a number of factors. Firstly, from the geological structure. But the relief and climate are also important, at what distance from the surface of the earth are ground waters, etc. Where the climate is arid, the number of lakes is less. Inland lakes are filled with particles of soil, shallow. If they are not looked after, they can become the very places where kikimors live. Although, it would seem, how are the lakes and swamps of Russia (and not only it) connected?
Many researchers say that the fate of the swamp awaits the Volga River, the speed of which sharply slowed down after the construction of the cascade of hydroelectric power plants (and other technological reasons), and self-cleaning was impaired. If 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 also formed gradually.
Amur region is leading
To the east of the Yenisei, the priest, there are not so many swamps. Eastern Siberia is covered by them only by ten percent. The most sites are lowlands along the valleys (including the Central Yakutskaya, the vast swampy plains of the Indigirskaya and North-Siberian, at the base of which lies the Khatanga Depression). Affects permafrost. 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 a legacy from periods when the climate was warm.
In the Far East, swamps also gravitate to floodplains of large rivers. Amur Region is a leader (up to 36 percent are concentrated there). A fifth of the swamps are impassable at all. There are ripples: at the top there is a layer of peat, and under them there is a pool of water. Kamchatka (especially the Okhotsk coast) and Sakhalin are considered boggy.