by Vladimir POPOV, Cand. Sc. (Geol. & Mineral.), Senior Research Fellow, Petrology and Volcanology Laboratory, Far Eastern Institute of Geology, RAS Far Eastern Branch, Vladivostok, Russia
Southern Primorye, or the Maritime Region of the Russian Far East, is unique in many ways. A region described with much love by such great travelers and naturalists as Nikolai Przewalski, Yuri and Valery Jankowskis, and by story writer Mikhail Prishvin. Most of this ecosystem is under the Far Eastern Sea and Biosphere Preserve in care of the Russian Academy of Sciences, together with the adjacent Khasan Natural Park. As a major area of international ecology and research tourism it needs special care and attention. Its geological objects (Krabbe and Novgorodsky peninsulas above all) are in fact open-air mineralogical museums with old, now dormant volcanoes that became inactive thirty million years ago. This is a mineral-rich territory with deposits of industrial stones-opal, chalcedony, agate...
These two peninsulas, Krabbe and Novgorodsky, attracted geologists long ago. Back in 1928 Edouard Anert, an eminent explorer of our Far East, described the Tertiary deposits flora there; and in 1945 Georgi Vlasov, another explorer, came up with a detailed map of Cenozoic formations in the Kraskino hollow--he did it during surveys for brown coal deposits in the Khasan district. His research findings still hold today.
The author of the present article also made a close study of volcanic formations there in the nineteen-nineties and later on. Field research data and those on succession of geological events made it possible to identify several foci of eruptions at Kraskino and Zaisanovka, and also on Novgorodsky and Krabbe peninsulas. Basalts and andesites (basic and intermediate rocks composed of plagioclase, olivine, pyroxene and volcanic glass), as it came out, are present in the
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Seashore map of southern Primorye where Krabbe Peninsula ...
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