What the Tepuyes hide

gertrudizvidal

· 18 Feb 2022

What the Tepuyes hide

#news Hello friends of Yoors, I want to tell you that the Venezuelan geography is very varied, full of different landscapes, throughout that beautiful country. Today I bring you a description of the enigmatic Venezuelan tepuis, widely visited by national and international tourists, as well as some photos that a friend who goes hiking gave me.
Talking about Tepuy, is talking about the great Venezuelan savannah, it is a kind of particularly abrupt plateau, with vertical walls and almost flat tops, mostly, very characteristic of the Venezuelan Guiana shield, mainly in the area of the Venezuelan Gran Sabana. Minerally, it is usually composed of quartzites and sandstones with some thin slate beds. It is also possible to find these special formations, but in smaller numbers and sizes, on the border with neighboring countries such as Guyana, Colombia and Brazil.
Tepuis are the oldest exposed formations on the planet; their origin dates back to the Precambrian. They are a complex between the northern border of the Amazon River and the Orinoco, between the Atlantic coast and the Negro River. Throughout the course of Earth's history, the plateau eroded, and tepuis formed.
Its name, in the indigenous Pemón language, which means mountain or abode of the gods. Tepuis are usually individually isolated rather than part of a common chain. This characteristic often makes them the environment where original and unique evolutionary forms develop, both animal and plant, never discovered by science.
In 2014, the Italian speleologist Franceso Sauro, was awarded the Rolex Prize for the initiative, when he highlighted part of the fantastic world that is hidden among these fantastic formations, and that is yet to be discovered. Nowadays, Tepuis are protected by Venezuelan laws under the figure of Natural Monuments and only some of them are allowed to ascend.
Scientists consider these mountains, as islands in time, erected on walls between 1,000 and 2,900 meters high, they resemble a stone fortress, a gigantic natural laboratory where, due to their difficult accessibility, natural communities have evolved in isolation.
Rivers and gigantic waterfalls are born on the peaks of these tepuis, the most special and well-known: Angel Falls, the highest waterfall in the world.
The Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle described it in his novel The Lost World, that its peaks were the habitat of huge dinosaurs.