What forests grow on the outskirts of St. Petersburg

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

There is a wealth of factual and circumstantial evidence that St. Petersburg is much older than the official age of 300. And until the end of the 17th century, the city was under water. If this is true, then the low-lying coastal part should have been the seabed. This is all that is inside the so-called Baltic glint.

On this map, the Baltic klint is indicated by the dotted line. There really is one more nuance here, this is the main klint with high "banks", about fifty meters. It's about him. He's in all reference books. There is also the Pulkovo Observatory on it. However, there is also a small klint, it is less pronounced and its height difference is only in the region of one or fifteen meters. It runs approximately halfway between the modern coastline and the Baltic Klint.

Official geology cautiously dates the Baltic klint as 11 thousand years old and admits the fact that this is the bottom of an ancient sea that retreated with a glacier.

Wikipedia is about this.

How to check how old? But in general, it's easy. You just need to go to the forests in those places and see what the grass and other trees grow on. If we find a certain layer of "chernozem", then by its thickness we can at least roughly determine the age.

For me personally, this task is facilitated by the fact that my dacha is right on the slope of the Baltic glint. So, everything above the ledge has a fairly thick layer of fertile humus, and so thick that it is industrially harvested and after adding peat, some vitamins and fertilizers are sold in stores as soil for seedlings and other plants. On average, the fertile layer of the earth is about 25-30 cm, no less than 20 cm, in some places up to 40 cm. In composition and appearance it is close to the classic black soil of the southern regions. This suggests that there has been no water on this part of the land for a long time. The grass turned green, the sun shone. Probably indeed millennia.

Along the ledge itself, along the slope, the soil is heterogeneous. But the fertile layer is also there, of course thinner, but nevertheless it is. Moreover, along the slope, the outcrops of sandy veins, the so-called quicksands, are sometimes clearly visible. I just have such an exit on the site, it is water-bearing, so there are no problems with (good) water, I'm lucky. There are also outlets of springs, of which there are also quite a few. There are three of them near my site within a radius of 300 meters.

What's below? In the vicinity of the city there are sown fields for haymaking and cut fields for vegetable crops. In general, there is nothing to look at, the lands are cultivated. But in the woods … But in the woods it is a completely different matter.

In order for our experiment to be the most correct, we will go to the most remote places. The selected point is the area of Lake Lubenskoe. Why this place? Because there is a wild wilderness once, and secondly there is just a small ledge and you can check above and below it.

According to my assumptions, only about 500 years ago this place was the seabed. And if this is so, then in fact there should not be any fertile humus and other black soil in these places. Or pitiful centimeters.

To understand what kind of wilderness it is and how to get there, here is a video where fishermen and mushroom pickers go there. I am both a fisherman and a mushroom picker, and therefore I know these places very well. Unfortunately, the video contains profanity, be careful.

On my own behalf, I will add that I broke my anther on Qashqai the year before last.

In general, it is clear what kind of forest. The usual forest of which we have around St. Petersburg is full, everything that is below the Baltic glint. The average thickness of trees is 40-50 cm at the base, the thickest up to 70 cm. There is no civilization there and never was, no quarries, no construction projects. A local forester with a glass once told me that in the 19th century these lands belonged to a certain Eliseev (Eliseevsky store on Nevsky Prospekt), and it seemed like he had apiaries there. If so, then this is an indirect confirmation of the youth of the local forests, because bees do not collect honey in Christmas trees, they need flowers.

It so happened that this summer large-scale works on laying fire ditches took place in this forest. There is no better gift for soil analysis. Moreover, ditches were made throughout the forest, to the very marshes, up and down from the small ledge. Collecting mushrooms, I carefully examined everything. The picture is the same everywhere, for many kilometers. As it turned out, the forest grows practically on gravel. Sand and stones. Above, only a thin layer of up to 5 cm of some rotted leaves and needles. Locally, in the roots, the centers of "chernozem" are also several centimeters thick. Where this very "black soil" appeared, grass and other lilies of the valley began to sprout, in other places only blueberries, lingonberries and moss. As it turned out, they grow on the sand, which I did not expect.

These are the fire ditches.

We see sand with stones (pebbles). The first photo was taken in the rain, from which there are some dark spots in the places where the water has applied dirt. The second photo was taken when it was dry. In places there are piles of stones, somewhere there are a lot of them, somewhere there are almost none. In the forest itself, I found very large boulders weighing tens and even hundreds of tons, and one boulder in general, almost half the size of the thunder of the stone under the monument to Peter.

In addition to the large ditches, the tractor also made a number of small grooves, where the cut of the soil is very clearly visible. Here is a photo of one of these grooves. We see only sand, and if the first 5-10 cm of sand mixed with humus, then below 5-10 cm the sand is pristine. Please note that honey mushrooms grow well on the sand.

Here I have attached a small bump about 8 cm long. This is the distance from the surface to the bottom root of the tree. Below is only clean sand.

And this is a shot from the inside of a large ditch. The sand was washed down by the rains, mud was applied from the dumps, but many small pebbles were exposed.

What conclusions can be drawn. Yes, in general, simple. The forests inside the Baltic klint, as it turned out, are completely devoid of layers of humus, which would inevitably exist if the forests were millennial. We see only the rudiments of such a layer, on average from 1 to 5 cm and not exceeding the local threshold of 10 cm. I don’t presume to judge how convincing evidence this fact will be for official historians, but for me personally this fact is one of the most damning. Most likely, dating the formation of forests in these places with all the flora and fauna inherent in these forests, we should talk about a couple of centuries, which confirms the assumption that there was a seabed in these places about 500 years ago.

16th century

17th century

Supplement as of 8.10.17.

After the publication of the article, questions arose about the rate of humus formation in forests. And for this, here is the following quote:

This information on the soil-forming process confirms the formation of chernozem soils under the forest and convincing evidence that the chernozem soils of forest landscapes are more powerful than the soils of open steppe landscapes.

Taken from here

Even greater indicators in the rate of growth of humus are given in the book of Doctor of Sciences M. E. Tkachenko. "General forestry".

However, here you can also argue, because there is factual material indicating somewhat different figures in the rate of growth of humus, and in the direction of decreasing. A pine forest grows on the coast of the Gulf of Finland, actually on the sand. There is no humus at all. But the explanation is simple, in open areas it is simply deflated and washed off. But at a distance, where nothing is blown away and washed off, we see a certain layer of humus, but as it turns out it is very thin - only up to 5 cm and only locally in low-lying areas with a greater thickness - up to 10 cm. Well, maybe still quite locally, where it was carried away and washed away thicker and where there are more birch trees - even a little thicker. One can argue about the age of the forest, but the whole dispute should fit into a question of centuries and even decades, but not millennia.

On this I think this issue can be closed.

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