Karst

Karst is an unusual word used to describe an interesting set of landforms and landforming processes. The word is the Germanic version of the Slovenian Kras, which refers to a particular limestone plateau in Slovenia and Italy that was named for being barren. It was there that the classic scientific descriptions of the landscape were made and, so, the Kras landforms were used as archetypes for features in many other places in the world. Several other languages, including Latin and Chinese, have their own terminologies, but the scientific community uses karst and other words to describe the landforms of the Kras Plateau or to any similarly formed surfaces.

Karstic landscapes are widely spread and found in areas underlain by particular rock types, structures, and goodly amounts of precipitation under tropical and middle latitude temperature conditions. Additionally, some of today’s areas are the products of paleoclimates no longer in existence at those locations. Prominent areas of karst are found in Morocco, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, China, Slovenia, Italy, the United States (the Ozarks, Appalachians, and Florida), Russia (Urals and eastern Siberia), Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, South Africa, Namibia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Papua New Guinea. It must be recognized, though, that karst regions represent a minority of the surface areas of these places. Karst landscapes can be quite rugged or very gentle depending on the subsurface rock, amount of precipitation, and the length of time over which the landscape has evolved.