The Karsts of North China

North of Changjiang (the Yangtse), the landscape is part of North China. Limestones are important in this landscape and in the economy, but are often covered or buried; their outcrops are much more isolated than in S China. Limestones outcrop widely in North China (Fig. 50), though not as continuously as in the south. The most continuous area is in Shanxi province where the Cambro-Ordovician limestones form an extensive plateau, but are covered by loess deposits. The Taihang range is the eastern part of the Shanxi plateau and is also in Ordovician limestones. In Shandong there are wide outcrops of mid-upper Cambrian and mid-lower Ordovician limestones in the mid-south of the province. In the mountains to the west and north of Beijing, limestones of various ages are prominent in different places. These include first, the area of Zhoukoudian which is a small area of Ordovician limestones at Longgushan, and which contains the cave of Peking Man (Homo erectus Pekingensis).And secondly, in the Xishan along the Juma river where the hills are as high as 1000 m and the karst is in siliceous dolomites of the Wumishan formation, late Precambrian or Middle Proterozoic; the well-known Yunshui cave is in the dolomites of the Wumishan formation. NE of Beijing, near Tangshan there are quite a number of limestone hills, mostly in the Sinian and Proterozoics; many of these hills are being actively quarried for the cement and ceramic industries of Tangshan. Karst limestones also occur in the northern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning. In Heilongjiang there are marbles of the early Palaeozoic; in Liaoning in the Taizi river basin, the limestones are Cambro-Ordovician (location map, Fig. 2).