Charyn Canyon

Charyn Canyon lies about 200 kilometers east of Almaty, Kazakhstan, near the border with China, and extends across some 154 kilometers of the Charyn River valley, with its most dramatic section, the Valley of Castles, running about 80 kilometers along the riverbanks. Depths there reach 150 to 300 meters, with the Temirlik tract section measuring up to 160 meters deep. The canyon is cut into sedimentary red sandstone that has been shaped by an atmogenic weathering process, meaning long exposure to atmospheric conditions has helped sculpt its colorful, sculptural rock forms, in addition to the direct work of the Charyn River, which rises in the Tian Shan mountains and has cut through the sedimentary layers over roughly the last million years to produce the canyon seen today. In 2021, researchers from the Max Planck Institute analyzed sediment samples from the canyon and recovered an unbroken five-million-year record of rainfall and climate change in the region. This entity documents Charyn Canyon specifically as a geological formation shaped by river and wind erosion of sedimentary sandstone.