How did table mountains appear? Table mountains. Wonders of nature. Table mountain Monte Santo Sardinia island, Italy

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14-01-2013, 23:31
Table mountains are one of the oldest geological formations on Earth, which formed about two billion years ago. The tops of such mountains, like huge tabletops, are home to rare plants and a large number of unique animals that are found nowhere else on the planet.

Mount Conner

In Australia, there is one of the brightest representatives of dining rooms - Mount Conner, the top of which is completely flat, and the rock itself has the shape of a horseshoe.

Brown Bluff

The 745-meter Mount Brown Bluff is located in the north of the Antarctic Peninsula. Although the rock is mostly ice, it is called "brown cliff" because in places where a pronounced reddish-brown vitreous mineral hyaloclastite is visible from under the snow cover. The shores at the foot of Brown Bluff are home to thousands of gentoo penguins and kelp gulls.

Mount Asgard

Mount Asgard is located on the territory of the Baffin Island National Park, which has two separate hills with flat tops. Asgard is named after the mythological celestial Asgard, the abode of the aesir gods.

Kukenan

Another flat-topped mountain is located in Venezuela, on the border with Guyana, not far from the famous Roraima peak - Mount Kukenan, which reaches a height of 2680 meters and a width of about three kilometers. It is considered one of the most difficult to comprehend, which is why climbers are less interested in it.

heroubreio

Table mountain Heroubreio is located in Iceland. It was formed after a volcanic eruption and is very dangerous, because collapses often occur here. It was first conquered in 1908.

Debre Damo

Mount Debre Damo has the flattest peak in the world and is located in northern Ethiopia. Here is also the oldest Christian monastery, which was built by Syrian monks in the VI century. Since the foundation of the monastery, it has kept a library of ancient manuscripts.

Canyonlands mountains

Canyonlands National Park, located in eastern Utah, is home to many rock formations, including flat-topped mountains. There are stunningly beautiful landscapes of huge hills and mountain erosion. The Green River and Colorado Rivers flow through the park, dividing it into several districts. One of the most beautiful places is an island in the sky Island in the Sky District.

Auyantepuy

In Venezuela, Mount Auyantepuy is one of the most visited natural attractions, whose name from the language of the Pemon tribe means "Devil's Mountain". Here, the highest Angel Falls in the world fall from the crevices of Auyantepuy.

Table top mountains are considered to be one of the most ancient geological formations on Earth, dating back two billion years. On the tops of the table mountains there are a large number of unique animals, unique plants grow that are not found anywhere else in the world. After admiring these unique wonders of nature, do not forget to leave your feedback in the comments. Also, complete the collection with others interesting places.

In continuation of the story about the highest mountains of the continents, a selection of amazing mesas of the world follows.

1. Mount Conner.

Mount Conner has a flat top, and the shape of the mountain itself is horseshoe-shaped.

2. Brown Bluff.

Located on the northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula, Brown Bluff has a height of 745 meters. The rock itself mostly consists of ice, but in some places a red-brown color is visible. The shores in front of Brown Bluff are home to thousands of penguins.

3. Mount Asgard.

Mount Asgard, with two separate spiky mountains and two flat peaks, is located in a national park on the island of Baffin Island. The peak is named after Asgard, the realm of the gods in Norse mythology.

4. Kukenan.

Mountain, 2680 meters high and about 3 km long. It is located next to the more famous Mount Roraima. Kukenan is a difficult mountain, so climbers are less interested in it than Mount Roraima.

Located in Iceland, the mountain has a flat top that was formed after a volcanic eruption. The mountain is very dangerous and landslides often occur on it. The first ascent was made in 1908.

6. Debre Damo.

Debre Damo is the flattest mountain in northern Ethiopia. On the mountain is the oldest monastery built in the 6th century by Syrian monks. The monastery has a library of manuscripts, preserved from the earliest existence of the monastery.

7. Canyonlands.

Canyonlands in eastern Utah is a national park with colorful landscapes, erosions, mountains and hills. The Colorado and Green Rivers divide the park into several districts. One area is an island in the sky, a place with amazing views.

8. Auyantepuy.

Auyantepuy, which means "Mountain of the Devil" in the Pemon language of the indigenous people, is the most visited place in Venezuela. The world's tallest waterfall, Angel Falls, falls from crevices near the top of Auyantepuy.

9. Mount Roraima.

Mount Roraima is the highest (2772 meters) and the most famous in Venezuela. Mount Roraima became famous in 1912 when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his novel The Lost World. He describes the ascent of Mount Roraima, how the mountain expedition went in search of prehistoric plants and dinosaurs.

10 Table Mountain

Overlooking Cape Town, Table Mountain is the most famous tabletop mountain in the world. The highest point on the mountain is 1086 meters above sea level.

On the Guiana Plateau of Latin America - in Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana, there are rocks with flat peaks, named in the local dialect of the indigenous peoples - Tepui, which means "house of the gods". The Tepui rock formations are composed of sheer blocks of Precambrian quartz sandstone. Separated from the surrounding landscape, hanging in the form of islands 1-3 thousand meters high above, tepui are the owners of endemic flora and fauna. Rare flowers grow on the high plateaus - orchids and, due to rocky soils that are poor in nutrients and unsuitable for other plant species.

At one time, science adhered to the hypothesis that the biodiversity of the rocky hills of South America is relict, which has not passed the stage of mixing of species. However, recent studies by scientists prove that tepui were not as rigidly isolated from the environment as previously thought - for example, the endemic Tepuihyla got to the top of Latin American tepui after the mountain range had formed. In total, there are about 60 flat-topped formations in this region.

The most famous mesas-tepui mountains in South America:

1. Roraima (Mount Roraima, 2810 m), peak area 31 km2. Inspired by the report of Robert Schomburk on the rock mass of Latin America, which was presented to the Royal Geographical Society in 1844, Conan Doyle wrote his story "The Lost World" - it was Roraima who became the prototype of a mysterious mountainous country inhabited by outlandish prehistoric animals.

Roraima Tepui, South America

2. Auantepui. This table mountain is the owner of the highest waterfall in the world - Angel (979 m), falling into a lake with a depth of 807 m. In the language of the indigenous population - Pemon, the waterfall was called Kerepakupai Vena until recently. The current name is Angel, he received in honor of the American pilot Jimmy Angel, whose monoplane made an emergency landing at the top of the plateau in 1937. It took the angel and his three companions 11 days to descend the mountain and return back to the civilized world. Only 33 years later, the legendary aircraft was raised from the top of the mountain, restored in the Aviation Museum and hoisted at the entrance to Ciudad Bolivar Airport.

Auan Tepui, Angel Falls, Venezuela

3. Kukenan or Matavi Tepui (Matawi Tepui), 2680 m), 3 km long. The local population, the Pemon Indians, consider the lonely standing table mountain to be the country of the dead, and the Kukenan River originates here.

Kukenan Tepui, Venezuela, South America

4. Ptari (Ptari-Tepui, 2700 m). The classic version of the table mountain of South America - with a perfectly cut top and absolutely vertical slopes.

Ptari tepui, Venezuela, Latin America

Carnivorous Heliamphora flower on Ptari Tepui

5. Autana Tepui, 1300 m. This plateau is notable for the fact that a horizontally oriented cave passes through its thickness, penetrating the rock through and through.

Tepui Autana, South America

6. Sarisarinam (Sarisarinama). The study of the mountain plateau began in 1961, when pilot Harry Gibson noticed unique natural holes on its flat top. Vertical cave-wells go deep into the rock - the longest of them has a length of 1.35 km.

Tepui Sarisarinama, Venezuela

Table mountain Tucumcari (Tucumcari Mountain) in Mexico is not much different from the tepui of the Guiana massif - at 1517 meters it rises above the South American savannah. Opened in 1793, the hermit peak caused a lot of controversy on the sidelines of scientists on the subject of age: at first it was assumed that the table mountain was formed during the Jurassic period, then it turned out that the rocky formation was younger and belongs to the Cretaceous period.

Tucumcari, Mexico

Nature has not bypassed Argentina either - there are also lonely mountains with horizontal ends on its territory - the duet of peaks of the Sierra Negra massif is located near the city of Zapala, famous for its coffee plantations. In addition to coffee, this region of South America is rich in precious metal deposits. In the depths of the mountain range there are gold mines, which have recently been run by the Canadian company Goldcorp - according to experts, about 0.5 million ounces of gold per year will be produced at the mine over the next 9 years, in July 2014 the first 100 kg were withdrawn from the stone depths.

Sierra Negra, Argentina

Table mountains of North America

The Canyonlands National Park in Utah, near the city of Moab, is a vivid example of eroded lands with multiple canyons, hills and mesas, between which the Colorado River and the Green River flow. The park is conditionally divided into three zones: Island in the Sky, Needles and Maze, each of which is remarkable in its own way. "Island in the Sky" is an extended plateau 366 m high, indented by the Colorado channel 305 m deep, with highest point White Rim, The Needles Zone is famous for its well-preserved mud dwellings and the "stone newspaper" - Newspaper Rock - with petroglyphs carved into the rocks. In the Maze zone is the Barrier Canyon, the most inaccessible part of the plateau, where rock paintings and pictograms of ancient hunter-gatherers dating back to 2000 BC have been found.

Canyon Land, Utah, USA

On the border between Utah and Arizona lies the Monument Valley with solitary flat-topped peaks sometimes reaching 300 meters. The local Navajo Indians call this area, which belongs to the Colorado Plateau, the Valley of the Stones. The terracotta color of the mountains is due to the presence of iron oxide in the rock, and the darker, gray-orange hue of some rocks is due to manganese oxide. In the 1950s, uranium, vanadium and copper were mined in Monument Valley.

Monument Valley, Utah, USA

In the state of Colorado, on the green plateau of Mesa Verde, is located national park- This is the country of Montezuma - ancient city, built by the Pueblo people (Anasazi Indians) many centuries ago. Over 600 rock dwellings were erected between 400 and 1200 AD. at the foot of the emerald table mountains and in their thickness, but after a 25-year drought, people were forced to leave their inhabited place.

City of Montezuma, Mesa Verde, Colorado, USA

Glass Mountains or Gloss Hills - mesas in the western region of Oklahoma (USA), rise above ground level from 46 to 61 meters. The array of hills with flat tops got its name back in 1820 from the first explorers of America due to sparkling inclusions of selenite.

Table Mountains Glass, Oklahoma, USA

In Oklahoma, on the Great Plains, there is another similar natural formation - the Black Mesa Plateau (Black Mesa, 1516 m) with a length of 270 km - on the top of this table mountain, native Indians have been setting up their camps for centuries.

Black Mesa, Oklahoma, USA

Over the coast of Cuba, in the province of Guantanamo, hangs the high plateau of El Yunque (El Yunque, 575 m), resembling a blacksmith's table in outline - this feature of the mountain served as the impetus for choosing its name: "yunque" is translated from Spanish as an anvil.

El Yunque, Cuba

Table mountains in Africa

Mountain fortress or Amba - the so-called table mountains in Africa - rocky plateaus in northern Ethiopia, composed of sandstone. There are three ambas in the Amhara region at once: Amba Geshen or Amara, Wehni and Debre Damo. The Amba Mountains are known as a place of imprisonment for brothers and male relatives of the king of Ethiopia, including sons. The unfortunate fell into a high-altitude dungeon immediately after the coronation of the heir to the throne and left it only after his death. When the sad tradition was annulled, in a remote mountainous area - in temples on the tops of rocks, they kept the treasures of the royal dynasty. Mount Geshen is famous for its Lalibela Orthodox Church in the form of a cross carved into the rock, and the table mountain Debre Damo (2216 m) is a Christian monastery of the 6th century.

Table mountain in Africa Debre Damo, Ethiopia

Orthodox monastery Lalibela on the table mountain Geshen, Ethiopia, Africa

African mesas in northern Ethiopia

On the territory of Ethiopia, many rocks with vertical slopes and a flat top are scattered: Amba Aradam (2756 m), Amba Alagi (3438 m), Kundudo (3000 m). In 2008, a lost stalagmite cave with ancient rock paintings was discovered on Mount Kundudo. Here is the habitat of the only population of wild horses preserved in the world.

Ammonites on Kundudo Mesa, Ethiopia

Coral stalagmites in a cave on Mount Kundudo, Ethiopia, Africa

The most famous African plateau in the world is the Table Mountain (1084 m) of Cape Town (South Africa) with a length of 3 km. It is also the symbol of the city, featured on its flag. A striking feature of the African mountain plateau - orographic clouds, almost constantly enveloping its top, form, as it were, a tablecloth on a flat tabletop. Local natives attribute unusual cloudiness to the devil lighting his pipe in the company of the pirate Van Hunky - this is ancient legend associated with Table Mountain. The age of the South African Table Mountain, built of hard gray quartz sandstone, is about 500 million years. The 2,200 species of plants growing on the high plateau are endemic and found nowhere else in the world. The symbol of the country of South Africa is, the unique species of which are presented in national park table mountain.

On the territory of Namibia, there are also several well-known rocky hills with a cut end: Etjo (500 m) with a length of 10 km, Grutberg (1840 m), Waterberg and Gamsberg. The table mountains of Namibia received their strange names in the Aryan way from the first German explorers.

Table Mountain Etjo, Namibia, Africa

Table mountain Gamsberg, Africa

Table Mountain Waterberg, Africa

Table mountains of Western Europe

An unusually beautiful rocky formation with a flat end in Ireland (County Sligo) - table mountain Ben Bulbin - is part of the array of green Darty mountains. The name comes from the Irish word Binn, which means "peak", and Ghulbain, "jaw". Table mountain Ben Balben was formed about 320 million years ago due to the movement of ice from the northeast to the southwest of the island, during the Ice Age. Once upon a time, a high-altitude plateau was under the thickness of an ancient sea, as evidenced by fossilized marine organisms - shells and found by scientists in all layers of the rock. Ben Bulben is composed mainly of limestone and mudstone, a fine-grained sedimentary rock composed of petrified mud and clay.

Table Mountain Ben Bulben, Ireland, Europe

Table mountain Monte Santo (Monte Santo, 733 m), adjacent to the flat-topped rock of San Antonio in the Siligo region, is a landmark of the island of Sardinia (Italy).

Table mountain Monte Santo Sardinia island, Italy

Australian table mountains

Terracotta rock Uluru (Ayers Rock, 348 m) is considered the "heart". Aborigines of the Anangu tribe settled in this area 10 thousand years ago, after a spring was discovered, beating directly from the top of a stone hill. Sacred to the natives, the table mountain of Uluru is shrouded in an ominous haze - it is believed that it brings bad luck to those who try to climb it or take a piece of stone with them.

northern mesas

In the northern latitudes, dining or table-top mountains have their own name - thuya (tuya). Tui are rock formations with a flat top, formed as a result of a volcanic eruption under the ice, as a result of which the lava came to the surface and transformed into solid basalt rocks after cooling.

Thuja Brown Bluff, about a million years old and about 1.5 km long, is located on the northern tip of Antarctica. Red-brown tuff at the foot of the table mountain smoothly turns into an ash-gray top, cut by erosion. Brown Bluff is a World Bird Sanctuary, home to an extensive bird colony of 20,000 pairs of Adélie penguins and 550 pairs of gentoos penguins.

Table Mountain Brown Bluff, Antarctica

On the territory of Canada, mainly in British Columbia, there are whole groups of high mountain plateaus. One of them is the 2021-meter table mountain Table Mountain, standing in the middle of Lake Garibaldi.

Table Mountain The Table, Canada

In the northern regions of the United States, you can find mesas-tuyas, formed on the site of stratovolcanoes and as a result of the descent of glaciers. In Oregon, there is the Hayrick Butte Plateau (1683 m) - this is a type of subglacial volcano with absolutely vertical slopes. At a distance of 3 km from it is another thuja volcano - Hogg Rock (Hogg Rock, 1548 m). Unlike other table formations, Hogg Rock has one gentle slope, along which a road is laid to the top of the plateau.

Table Mountain Hayrick Butte in Oregon, USA

Diomede Islands in the Coastal Strait

The unusual Diomedes Islands, the smaller of which belongs to the United States, and the larger of which belongs to Russia, are subglacial dormant thuja volcanoes in the Bering Strait with a flat top. During the Cold War between the USSR and the USA, Diomedes, between which the state border passes, were symbolically called the "ice curtain".

In contact with

The wild beauty of the mountains beckons and, at the same time, guards - the giant rocky peaks conceal an age-old secret. Among the many mountain ranges, table mountains are especially mysterious, soaring alone above the landscape - they seem unreal, abandoned to Earth from another galaxy, although their flat top and steep slopes were formed as a result of quite understandable tectonic processes. Separated from the earth's surface many millions of years ago, high mountain plateaus - carriers of a unique, amazing flora and fauna - this is a unique "lost" world, as if descended from the pages of Arthur Conan Doyle's story.

Table Mountains: origin
Table Mountain (mesa, tableland, tafelberg) is a mountain plateau with an absolutely flat, as if cut, surface supported by steep slopes - hence the origin of the name of the lonely relief formations found on all continents of our planet. Flat-topped rocks owe their origin to tectonic activity, which once raised them above the surface.


McKay, Ontario, Canada
The final touch to the formation of rocky plateaus was made by the processes of erosion and weathering - soft rocks were washed away, while harder ones - sandstone, quartzite, basalt, limestone - remained. A separate group is made up of table mountains formed as a result of volcanic eruptions - they are characterized by a peak composed of igneous rocks.

Table mountains of South America
On the Guiana Plateau of Latin America - in Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana, there are rocks with flat peaks, named in the local dialect of the indigenous people - Tepui, which means "house of the gods." The Tepui rock formations are composed of sheer blocks of Precambrian quartz sandstone. Separated from the surrounding landscape, hanging in the form of islands 1-3 thousand meters high above the tropical forest, tepui are the owners of endemic flora and fauna. Rare flowers grow on the high plateaus - orchids and carnivorous plants, due to rocky soils that are poor in nutrients and unsuitable for other plant species.


Tepui-Ujnaya-America

At one time, science adhered to the hypothesis that the biodiversity of the rocky hills of South America is relict, which has not passed the stage of mixing of species. However, recent research by scientists proves that tepui were not as tightly isolated from the environment as previously thought - for example, the endemic tree frog Tepuihyla got to the top of Latin American tepui after the mountain range had formed. In total, there are about 60 flat-topped formations in this region.

The most famous mesas-tepui mountains in South America:

1. Roraima (Mount Roraima, 2810 m), peak area 31 km2. Inspired by the report of Robert Schomburk on the rock mass of Latin America, which was presented to the Royal Geographical Society in 1844, Conan Doyle wrote his story "The Lost World" - it was Roraima who became the prototype of a mysterious mountainous country inhabited by outlandish prehistoric animals.

Roraima Tepui, South America

2.Auantepui. This table mountain is the owner of the highest waterfall in the world - Angel (979 m), falling into a lake with a depth of 807 m. In the language of the indigenous population - Pemon, the waterfall was called Kerepakupai Vena until recently. The current name is Angel, he received in honor of the American pilot Jimmy Angel, whose monoplane made an emergency landing at the top of the plateau in 1937. It took the angel and his three companions 11 days to descend the mountain and return back to the civilized world. Only 33 years later, the legendary aircraft was raised from the top of the mountain, restored in the Aviation Museum and hoisted at the entrance to Ciudad Bolivar Airport.

Auan Tepui, Angel Falls, Venezuela

3. Kukenan or Matavi tepui (Matawi Tepui) , 2680 m), 3 km long. The local population, the Pemon Indians, consider the lonely standing table mountain to be the country of the dead, and the Kukenan River originates here.

Kukenan Tepui, Venezuela, South America

4. Ptari (Ptari-Tepui, 2700 m ). The classic version of the table mountain of South America - with a perfectly cut top and absolutely vertical slopes.

Ptari tepui, Venezuela, Latin America


Carnivorous Heliamphora flower on Ptari Tepui

5. Autana Tepui, 1300 m ). This plateau is notable for the fact that a horizontally oriented cave passes through its thickness, penetrating the rock through and through.

Tepui Autana, South America

6. Sarisarinam (Sarisarinama). The study of the mountain plateau began in 1961, when pilot Harry Gibson noticed unique natural holes on its flat top. Vertical cave-wells go deep into the rock - the longest of them has a length of 1.35 km.

Tepui Sarisarinama, Venezuela
Table mountain Tucumcari (Tucumcari Mountain) in Mexico is not much different from the tepui of the Guiana massif - at 1517 meters it rises above the South American savannah. Opened in 1793, the hermit peak caused a lot of controversy on the sidelines of scientists on the subject of age: at first it was assumed that the table mountain was formed during the Jurassic period, then it turned out that the rocky formation was younger and belongs to the Cretaceous period.

Tucumcari, Mexico
Nature has not bypassed Argentina either - there are also lonely mountains with horizontal ends on its territory - the duet of peaks of the Sierra Negra massif is located near the city of Zapala, famous for its coffee plantations. In addition to coffee, this region of South America is rich in precious metal deposits. In the depths of the mountain range there are gold mines, which have recently been run by the Canadian company Goldcorp - according to experts, about 0.5 million ounces of gold per year will be mined at the mine over the next 9 years, in July 2014 the first 100 kg were withdrawn from the stone depths.

Sierra Negra, Argentina

Table mountains of North America
Canyonlands National Park (Canyonlands National Park) in Utah, near the city of Moab - a vivid example of eroded lands with multiple canyons, hills and mesas, between which the Colorado River and the Green River flow. The park is conditionally divided into three zones: Island in the Sky, Needles and Maze, each of which is remarkable in its own way. "Island in the Sky" is an extended plateau 366 m high, cut by the Colorado channel 305 m deep, with the highest point of White Rim, the Needles Zone is famous for well-preserved clay dwellings of American aborigines and the "stone newspaper" - Newspaper Rock - with carved on rocks with petroglyphs. In the Maze zone is the Barrier Canyon - the most inaccessible part of the plateau, where rock paintings and pictograms of ancient hunter-gatherers dating back to 2 thousand years BC were found.

Canyon Land, Utah, USA
On the border between Utah and Arizona lies the Monument Valley with solitary flat-topped peaks sometimes reaching 300 meters. The local Navajo Indians call this area, which belongs to the Colorado Plateau, the Valley of the Stones. The terracotta color of the mountains is due to the presence of iron oxide in the rock, and the darker, gray-orange hue of some rocks is due to manganese oxide. In the 1950s, uranium, vanadium and copper were mined in Monument Valley.

Monument Valley, Utah, USA
In the state of Colorado, on the green Mesa Verde plateau, there is a national park - this is the country of Montezuma - an ancient city built by the Pueblo people (Anasazi Indians) many centuries ago. Over 600 rock dwellings were erected between 400 and 1200 AD. at the foot of the emerald table mountains and in their thickness, but after a 25-year drought, people were forced to leave their inhabited place.

City of Montezuma, Mesa Verde, Colorado, USA
Glass Mountains or Gloss Hills - table mountains in the western region of Oklahoma (USA), rise above ground level from 46 to 61 meters. The array of hills with flat tops got its name back in 1820 from the first explorers of America due to sparkling inclusions of selenite.

Table Mountains Glass, Oklahoma, USA
In Oklahoma, on the Great Plains, there is another similar natural formation - the Black Mesa Plateau (Black Mesa, 1516 m) with a length of 270 km - on the top of this table mountain, native Indians have been setting up their camps for centuries.

Black Mesa, Oklahoma, USA
Over the coast of Cuba, in the province of Guantanamo, hangs the high plateau of El Yunque (El Yunque, 575 m), resembling a blacksmith's table in outline - this feature of the mountain served as the impetus for choosing its name: "yunque" is translated from Spanish as an anvil.

El Yunque, Cuba

Table mountains in Africa
Mountain fortress or Amby - the so-called table mountains in Africa - rocky plateaus in northern Ethiopia, composed of basalt and sandstone. There are three ambas in the Amhara region at once: Amba Geshen or Amara, Wehni and Debre Damo. The Amba Mountains are known as a place of imprisonment for brothers and male relatives of the king of Ethiopia, including sons. The unfortunate fell into a high-altitude dungeon immediately after the coronation of the heir to the throne and left it only after his death. When the sad tradition was annulled, in a remote mountainous area - in the temples on the tops of the rocks, they kept the treasures of the royal dynasty. Mount Geshen is famous for its Lalibela Orthodox Church in the form of a cross carved into the rock, and the table mountain Debre Damo (2216 m) is a Christian monastery of the 6th century.

Table mountain in Africa Debre Damo, Ethiopia


Orthodox monastery Lalibela on the table mountain Geshen, Ethiopia, Africa


African mesas in northern Ethiopia
On the territory of Ethiopia, many rocks with vertical slopes and a flat top are scattered: Amba Aradam (2756 m), Amba Alagi (3438 m), Kundudo (3000 m). In 2008, a lost stalagmite cave with ancient rock paintings was discovered on Mount Kundudo. Here is the habitat of the only population of wild horses preserved in the world.

Table mountain Kundudo, Ethiopia, Africa


Ammonites on Kundudo Mesa, Ethiopia


Coral stalagmites in a cave on Mount Kundudo, Ethiopia, Africa

The most famous African plateau in the world is the Table Mountain (1084 m) of Cape Town (South Africa) with a length of 3 km. It is also the symbol of the city, featured on its flag. A striking feature of the African mountain plateau - orographic clouds, almost constantly enveloping its top, form, as it were, a tablecloth on a flat tabletop. Local natives attribute unusual cloudiness to the devil lighting his pipe in the company of the pirate Van Hunky - this is an ancient legend associated with Table Mountain. The age of the South African Table Mountain, built of hard gray quartz sandstone, is about 500 million years. The 2,200 species of plants growing on the high plateau are endemic and found nowhere else in the world. The symbol of the country of South Africa is a rare protea flower, the unique species of which are presented in the Table Mountain National Park.

Table Mountain Cape Town, South Africa, Africa
On the territory of Namibia, there are also several well-known rocky hills with a cut end: Etjo (500 m) with a length of 10 km, Grutberg (1840 m), Waterberg and Gamsberg. The table mountains of Namibia received their strange names in the Aryan way from the first German explorers.

Table Mountain Etjo, Namibia, Africa


Table mountain Gamsberg, Africa


Table Mountain Waterberg, Africa

Table mountains of Western Europe
An unusually beautiful rocky formation with a flat end in Ireland (County Sligo) - table mountain Ben Balben (Benbulbin) - is part of the array of green mountains Darty. The name comes from the Irish word Binn, which means "peak", and Ghulbain, "jaw". Table mountain Ben Balben was formed about 320 million years ago due to the movement of ice from the northeast to the southwest of the island, during the Ice Age. Once upon a time, the high plateau was under the thickness of the ancient sea, as evidenced by fossilized marine organisms - shells and corals found by scientists in all layers of the rock. Ben Bulben is composed mainly of limestone and mudstone, a fine-grained sedimentary rock composed of petrified mud and clay.

Table Mountain Ben Bulben, Ireland, Europe

Table mountain Monte Santo (Monte Santo, 733 m), adjacent to the flat-topped rock of San Antonio in the Siligo region, is a landmark of the island of Sardinia (Italy).


Table mountain Monte Santo Sardinia island, Italy

Australian table mountains
Terracotta rock Uluru (Ayers Rock, 348 m) is considered the "heart" of Australia. Aborigines of the Anangu tribe settled in this area 10 thousand years ago, after a spring was discovered, beating directly from the top of a stone hill. Sacred to the natives, the table mountain Uluru is shrouded in an ominous haze - it is believed that it brings bad luck to those who try to climb it or take a piece of stone with them.

Table Mountain Uluru, Australia

northern mesas
In the northern latitudes, canteens or tabletop mountains have their own name - thuya (tuya). Tui are rock formations with a flat top, formed as a result of a volcanic eruption under the ice, as a result of which the lava came to the surface and transformed into solid basalt rocks after cooling.

Table Mountain Brown Bluff, Antarctica
Thuja Brown Bluff, about a million years old and about 1.5 km long, is located on the northern tip of Antarctica. Red-brown tuff at the foot of the table mountain smoothly turns into an ash-gray top, cut by erosion. Brown Bluff is a world ornithological reserve - here is the habitat of an extensive colony of birds: 20 thousand pairs of Adélie penguins and 550 pairs of gentoos penguins.

Table Mountain Brown Bluff, Antarctica
On the territory of Canada, mainly in British Columbia, there are whole groups of high mountain plateaus. One of them is the 2021-meter table mountain Table Mountain, standing in the middle of Lake Garibaldi.

Table Mountain The Table, Canada
In the northern regions of the United States, you can find mesas-tuyas, formed on the site of stratovolcanoes and as a result of the descent of glaciers. In Oregon, there is the plateau Hayrick Butte (Hayrick Butte, 1683 m) - this is a kind of subglacial volcano with absolutely vertical slopes. At a distance of 3 km from it there is another thuja volcano - Hogg Rock (Hogg Rock, 1548 m). Unlike other table formations, Hogg Rock has one gentle slope, along which a road is laid to the top of the plateau.

Table Mountain Hayrick Butte in Oregon, USA


Diomede Islands in the Coastal Strait
The unusual Diomedes Islands, the smaller of which belongs to the United States, and the larger of which belongs to Russia, are subglacial dormant thuja volcanoes in the Bering Strait with a flat top. During the Cold War between the USSR and the USA, Diomedes, between which the state border passes, were symbolically called the "ice curtain".

Table mountains on Mars
Alpine plateaus in the form of table mountains exist not only on Earth, in the solar system they are also found on Mars - in the transition zone between the highlands and the plain, and their height varies from 100 m to 2 km. Scientists believe that the Martian mesas were formed due to the movement of ice and its subsequent evaporation in the atmosphere.