Here’s another postcard – this one over Official Postcrossing – from China! After a bit of fun on mobliefish.com (which I’ll gladly endorse after all the help it’s given me), I managed to translate the characters in the top-left. This is Yushilin, the jade stone forest of Hezhou, Guangxi province (located in the southern part of the country). Yushilin Stone Forest is part of the larger Guposhan National Forest Park, and it’s the only white marble geological park in all of China. The natural masterpiece that you see here is a result of geological movements taking place approximately a hundred million years ago! This kind of formation is known as a karst. There’s also a much larger karst that spreads into Guangxi and a few other provinces known as the South China Karst, which is about 270 million years old. Karsts are formed through the dissolution (the act of dissolving) of limestone over millennia and millennia. While Yushilin is not limestone, marble is also a soluble stone, so it was not exempt from the karstification. In attempting to research the process of karstification, APFY ran into some problems, including a brush burn on the back of the admin’s head while scratching it in awe of all the foreign geological terminology. BUT – I did gain something from it! A karst formation starts out as layers of soluble rock. When water comes around (usually in the form of rainfall), it seeps into the cracks in the rock, allowing for the dissolution of it. As it whittles it away from the inside, it causes pillars as a result! That’s my understanding of the process, at least. Thank you so much for such an enlightening postcard, Liao!
