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Abstract:

Carbonate rocks of upper Cretaceous, Paleocene and Eocene crop out in cuesta escarpments in different sectors of the eastern part of the Inner Range of the Crimean fore-mountains. Scarps and adjacent strips of the plateaus demonstrate a set of features, characteristic and unique for the Crimean fore-mountain region, represented by various conduit and cavernous forms (karstified fractures, grottoes, niches, caves, vugs and zones of vuggy porosity), sculptured surfaces and honeycomb, boxwork and spongework surfaces of scarps, and also by couloirs and blind valleys in the near-scarp strips of structural slopes. The paper demonstrates that all these forms are relics of the morphology of sub-vertical hypogenic rift-like conduits, their meso-elements and forms of the vuggy fringe, exposed due to the scarp retreat by block toppling. Previous ideas of the formation of grottoes and niches in scarps by processes of external weathering and gravitational destruction are shown to be inadequate, and the hypogenic karst origin of these forms is firmly established. The analysis of distribution and morphology of relict hypogenic karst features has allowed reconstructing the structure and functioning of hypogenic karst systems, which had been formed by dissolution and metasomatic alteration of host rocks under confined conditions, along cross-formational tectonic fractures organized in linear corridors and clusters. Interaction of rising fracture-vein waters of the deep circulation system with intra- and interstratal waters of shallower systems played a particular role in hypogenic speleogenesis. It is shown that hypogenic karst was one of the primary factors of regional geomorphic development as it determined locations and morphology of the cuesta escarpments, as well as further landform development in the adjacent areas of the structural surfaces.