Lena Pillars

The Lena Pillars Nature Park was created in 1994 in the republic of Sakha, or Yakutia, in eastern Siberia, and protects a stretch of the Lena valley where erosion has sculpted an extraordinary formation: a succession of rock columns and towers rising as much as two hundred metres above the bank and running for tens of kilometres.

Those columns have developed on limestones and dolomites of Cambrian origin, laid down in a shallow sea some five hundred million years ago. The combination of an extreme continental climate — with annual temperature swings of almost a hundred degrees, from forty below zero in winter to forty above in summer — and the presence of permafrost has produced weathering by freeze-thaw cycles that has gradually split the blocks vertically, giving rise to the pillars. The process is still active.

The property was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2012 for its geological and geomorphological value. The Cambrian strata of the area also contain fossils of the first complex faunas, from the period immediately after the Cambrian explosion, and remains of Pleistocene megafauna have been found in the river terraces, including woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and steppe bison. The vegetation is Dahurian larch taiga over permafrost, the dominant forest formation in Yakutia.