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Elbe Sandstones

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Landscapes and Landforms of the Czech Republic

Part of the book series: World Geomorphological Landscapes ((WGLC))

Abstract

The Elbe Sandstones is a sandstone area of the Czech Republic constituting the north-western part of the Bohemian Cretaceous Basin . Characteristic landscape with plateaus, deep canyons , rock cities and a wide range of small landforms developed on massive quartzose sandstone deposits mostly of Middle Turonian age. The region has special status compared to other similar areas by its large areal extent, its vertical diversity causing the high-energy relief, the presence of volcanic bodies forming significant elevations and relative wilderness of inaccessible rock massifs and extensive forests. The dominant feature and also the connecting element is the huge Elbe River Canyon , meandering through sandstones between Děčín and Pirna in Saxony. The most famous object of the whole area is the Pravčická brána Arch —the largest sandstone arch in Europe. The table mountain of Vysoký Sněžník Hill and the typical rock city called the Tiské Stěny Cliffs belong to other interesting places here. The landscape is unique not only because of its geomorphic diversity but also because of the close relationship between the living and inanimate nature and the presence of relicts after ancient settlement. A higher occurrence of natural geohazards , especially the threat of rockfall t ogether with the degradation of sandstone cliffs due to weathering processes belong among the most pressing challenges of present time.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Jiří Adamovič for a linguistic revision. Figures 11.2a, 11.3, 11.7a, 11.8a, 11.9b and 11.10a were created on basis of geodata provided by the Bohemian Switzerland National Park Administration. We acknowledge to Chair of Remote Sensing, Institute for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Dresden University of Technology, for providing the digital terrain model created from airborne laser scanning data in the frame of the EU INTERREG IIIA project “Geoinformation Networks for the cross-border National Park Region of Saxon-Bohemian Switzerland”. Digital elevation models SRTM DEM (Courtesy NGA and NASA) and ASTER GDEM (Courtesy NASA and METI) were used to visualize terrain of the area outside the Elbe Sandstones Region.

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  1. Museum of the City of Ústí nad Labem, Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic

    Zuzana Vařilová

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  1. Zuzana Vařilová
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Correspondence to Zuzana Vařilová .

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  1. Department of Physical Geography and, University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Moravskoslezsky, Czech Republic

    Tomáš Pánek

  2. Department of Physical Geography and, University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic

    Jan Hradecký

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Vařilová, Z. (2016). Elbe Sandstones. In: Pánek, T., Hradecký, J. (eds) Landscapes and Landforms of the Czech Republic. World Geomorphological Landscapes. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27537-6_11

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