?rk?t Cs?rdahegy palaeokarst

[Peter Burgess]

Members might be interested in this curious site I visited a few weeks ago.

The mining by hand of a manganese deposit in western Hungary revealed an ancient Jurassic karst surface believed to be the same sort of thing as pinnacle karst such as you find in tropical areas today. I have uploaded a few images to the aditnow website.

http://www.aditnow.co.uk/mines/?rk?t-Cs?rdahegy-Manganese-Mine/

 

[Les W]

Looks very similar to this area around the Cabarceno zoo outside Santander in Northern Spain. I believe they mined Iron here though but the pinnacle karst looks very similar.

 

[Peter Burgess]

The site in Hungary is very small. If pushed, you could walk right round it in 5 minutes. How do I get larger versions of the images on that link? It looks like an interesting place.

 

[Les W]

It is interesting. The site is huge and the authorities have adapted it to be a zoo like no other. You drive between the exhibits and each group of animals has a massive pen which looks natural as they have used the natural terrain as barriers and only built walls where necessary.

I believe the site was an iron mine and all they did was to extract the iron rich soil from between the limestone thereby exposing the pinnacles.

The whole zoo is as large as a safari park but you get out of the car at each pen. At the bear enclosure we could only see two bears until the food truck arrived then about 40 bears appeared from various parts of the enclosure. It is really nice to see the animals in an almost natural environment, no bars and large expanses of space for them.

Sorry but I cannot find any websites that give better images, I will check my photos to see if I have any.

The virtual tour on the web site has a geological section if you can be arsed to translate it.