Loess Plateau

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Loess Plateau (Chinese: 黄土高原) is a plateau that covers an area of some 640,000 km² in the upper and middle parts of China's Yellow River. Loess is the name for the silty soil that has been deposited by wind storms on the plateau over the ages. Loess is a highly erosion-prone soil that is susceptible to the forces of wind and water. The Loess Plateau and its dusty soil cover almost all of Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Gansu provinces, the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and parts of others.

The Loess Plateau provides simple yet insulated shelter from the cold winter and hot summer in the region, as homes called yaodong (Chinese: 窑洞) were often carved into the loess soil; some families still live in this kind of shelter in modern times. During the Shaanxi Earthquake, nearly a million people were killed as a result of collapsing loess caves. The yaodongs that are best-known to the world are perhaps those in Yan'an where the Communist Party led by Mao Zedong headquartered in 1930s. When Edgar Snow, the author of Red Star Over China, visited Mao and his party, he lived in a yaodong.

The Loess Plateau was highly fertile and easy to farm in ancient times, which contributed to the development of early Chinese civilization around the Loess Plateau.

Hundreds of years of deforestation and over-grazing, exacerbated by China's population increase, have resulted in degenerated ecosystems, desertification and poor local economies.

The Loess Plateau was formed over long geologic times, and scientists have derived valuable information about global climate change from samples taken from the deep layer of its silty soil.