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Time Cowboy
Nov 4, 2007

But Tarzan... The strangest thing has happened! I'm as bare... as the day I was born!
There are some strange landforms in Central Asia that I can't quite figure out. You can see them even at a pretty low zoom, they're that big:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=54.252389,82.836914&spn=8.104975,30.300293&t=h&z=6

I'm referring to those parallel strips of alternating high and low terrain. Perhaps the extremely weathered remains of some ancient continental collision belt, even older than the Appalachians? It might be clearer on a terrain map:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=53.350551,81.013184&spn=4.138461,15.150146&t=p&z=7

If you zoom in, it's one of the weirdest looking terrains I've ever seen:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=52.772863,81.870117&spn=0.524237,1.893768&t=h&z=10

But it gets weirder. Zooming in on one of the lakes in the northwest corner of this weirdness, you find this:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=54.85843,78.024902&spn=0.49878,1.893768&t=h&z=10

Still following that same southwest-northeast trend of the landform, What the hell is it?

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Time Cowboy
Nov 4, 2007

But Tarzan... The strangest thing has happened! I'm as bare... as the day I was born!
It's definitely post-glacial. What you suggest about tilted rock layers would make sense, except that's a really consistent alternation across a big chunk of country. I could see it being alternating layers of, say, sandstone and limestone; the sandstone would have resisted the glacial erosion better than the limestone, which would become the lowlying, lake-dotted bands of terrain. Whatever it is, I've never seen anything like it on such a scale.

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