It's minus 30 degrees Celsius in the northeast, a temperature that's enough to make life hibernating, the mountains discolored, and the rivers frozen until they freeze for thousands of miles. Can you imagine?In such an environment, there is a river that does not move all year round, what kind of river is this?Why can't even the power of freezing everything freeze it?To answer this question, we must go to Daxing Nanling, where it is. Daxinganling Arctic Christmas Village
This is one of the few large mountain ranges in China that basically runs north-south, extending from Chifeng in Inner Mongolia all the way north to the highest latitude in the country, and can reach the Arctic Mohe River in China as far north as China, with a length of more than 1,400 kilometers, and we have now reached the middle of the Great Xing'an Mountains, Arshan City of the Xing'an League in Inner Mongolia.
It's around 04:20 p.m. Beijing time, but the sun has all set. The sunrise this morning was about half past seven, which meant that the daylight was less than nine hours.
Due to the high latitude, after the autumn equinox every year, the days here are sharply shortened, even at noon, the sun is only hanging in the low treetops, so it will enter the winter from the end of September, and will not bloom until May of the following year, coupled with the strong winter wind through the flat Mongolian Plateau, almost with the most violent momentum across the Great Khing'an Mountains, making it one of the coldest areas in China in winter, and even breaking the lowest temperature record in China with a low temperature of minus 53 degrees Celsius. Therefore, only albino, blackened pine, and the most hardy Hung Yen larch. In such an extremely cold place, ice and snow are undoubtedly the absolute protagonists of winter, and in the Ershan area, the annual snow cover period can exceed 150 days, and the maximum snow depth can be exceeded.
Half a meter deep, enough to reach my knees, but it was here that we finally saw the legendary river Fudo.
In fact, this 399-kilometre-long 399-kilometre-long river originates in the Great Khing'an Mountains and eventually flows into Lake Bear in the Hulunbuir grassland. And when it flows through the Arshan area, nearly 20 kilometers of the river miraculously escaped the fate of freezing, like cutting a crack in the frozen earth, ignoring the bubbling of ice and snow. I felt it with my hands, and it didn't feel as cold and piercing as I imagined. Now let's take a brief measure of the water temperature, and the water temperature we measured is basically 2Between 5 and 3 degrees Celsius, today's temperature is about minus 20 degrees Celsius, which means that there is a temperature difference of about 23 degrees Celsius between the water temperature and the air temperature.
It's like a fairyland, when these vapours meet the shore.
Branches with lower temperatures can even skip the link of condensing into water droplets from the gaseous state, and directly condense into a solid state, forming a white rime hanging on the branches. They wrap the whole tree firmly, and together with the white snow and snow, and the white mist, they create a pure white fairy tale world. However, we are not the only ones who are attracted to the Fudo River.
And them. Under the year-round river, green aquatic plants grow here, making it a rare source of water and foraging ground for these cattle in winter. So, why does such a river exist in the northeast at minus 30 degrees?What exactly should we find clues from **?
I took a turn and found that the answer was actually hidden in these rounded ancient bags. These rocks rise above the water, leaving the only foothold for the snow and ice. When we peel back the snow covering above, we will see that these are not ordinary rocks, they are black and covered with pores, which is characteristic of basalt. Usually the stomata on the surface of such rocks are formed by the cooling of magma.
That's right, magma, we seem to have found the source of the fiery heat of this land. If there is still lava in the ground in this area that has not yet cooled, then the reason why the river does not move is easy to explain.
The answer is that the hot water is beneath the surface, and the hot magma forms a powerful heat source that continuously transfers heat to the nearby groundwater. But this is not enough, the other key is the existence of fissures between the underground rocks, which not only serve as channels for recharging groundwater, but also allow heated groundwater to pass through the aquifer to the surface. When the hot spring water pours into the river, the snow melts and even does not move for the whole year, and it seems that it can compete with the frozen power of the earth.
Sure enough, there is only this planet's own power, so where does this magma come from?Is it a coincidence?
I'm now at a distance of three kilometres from the river, and from that point of view, it's a vast snowfield, but we can only see how special it is when we fly high into the sky. Its shape is almost round, and it looks like a pearl in the sea under the cover of the forest. You guessed it, this is a volcano that was created by a loud bang hundreds of thousands of years ago, and then accumulated water into a lake, and is known as Tianchi at an altitude of 1,322 meters. There are six more such Tianchi in the vicinity, making it one of the densest areas in the world. Although the surface of the lake is now completely frozen, there is still a power beneath them that the earth cannot seal.
Hey, I'm turning on the seat heated up has been opened.
So you'll find that it's no coincidence that the basalt we see in the Fudo River is actually not a coincidence, because we are already in a highly dense volcanic complex, and the youngest of them has erupted. But about 2,000 years ago, when viewed from above, the lava that once covered the surface is still visible, clogging the Haraha River and forming the four large dammed lakes we see today.
When we walk directly into this lava, we will find that it is a sea of basalt, with a clear boundary with the nearby woods. You can imagine how shocking it will be when the snow melts and the whole sea of black rocks is revealed.
It's not hard to explain why there are four hot springs and at least 70 springs within a radius of just over 30 kilometers in the vicinity. But the story is not over here, when we look at the Great Khing'an Mountains, we will find that in addition to the Arshan volcanic group in the middle, there are also a number of large and small volcanoes located on this large mountain range, and in the entire northeast region, there are more famous volcanic groups such as Changbai Mountain, Jingpo Lake, Wudalianchi, Longgang and so on, forming the most dense area of active volcanoes in China.
This also means that the unfrozen river in Arshan is not an isolated root river in Hulunbuir, the dry river in Jiagedaqi, the Erdaobai River in Changbai Mountain, and even more places that we have yet to discover, the confrontation between ice and fire continues.
For most people, they may never experience a moment of volcanic eruption in their lifetime, but the earth never stops shaping. Perhaps, when we walk beside these rivers that flow in the extreme cold again, we will not only hear the sound of flowing water all year round, but the magnificent power of this planet that resounds in the depths of the earth.