Quartz-sandstone pillars standing hundreds of metres out of the forest in Hunan, and the mechanism is worth knowing because it is not the usual one. This is not karst; nothing is dissolving. The rock is being levered apart physically, by water freezing and expanding in the joints through winter and by plant roots doing the same more slowly, with streams carrying the debris away, which leaves the columns behind. The Southern Sky Column stands 1,080 metres and was officially renamed Avatar Hallelujah Mountain in January 2010, after the film’s designers said they had drawn the floating rocks mainly from Guilin, Huangshan and here. Two pieces of engineering are attractions in their own right: the Bailong elevator, 326 metres up the outside of a cliff since 2002 and the tallest outdoor lift in the world, and the 430 metre glass bridge at 300 metres, opened 2016.
Hunan, China
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