Datong Earth Forest: The 'Devil's City' on the Loess Plateau, a gift from nature

Datong Earth Forest, located in Duzhuang Village, Yunzhou District. After years of erosion by wind and water, it has finally formed a strange landscape that looks like ancient castles and sculptures, becoming the only 'Devil's City' in North China. On the land of Yunzhou, time commands the wind and water to make the soft and loose loess 'stand', forming a unique loess earth forest, showing the toughness and strength of the Loess Plateau. The tectonic movement in the Earth Forest area is active. In the cycle of surface water erosion, soil weathering, and salt precipitation, the thin soil ditches gradually widen, forming the 'stone ditch' in the local people's mouth. The so-called stone slabs are the calcified layers formed in the soil. It is the stacking of these wonderful stone slabs that has created this geological wonder of the Earth Forest. Independent and interconnected earth walls and pillars gather here, and the calcium, iron and other elements contained in the soil interact with sunlight to form the incomparable color image of the Earth Forest. The beauty of the Earth Forest is colorful and magnificent. Between morning and evening, the colors are bright, sometimes golden, sometimes red as flames, sometimes as deep as abyss, sometimes as white as frost fields, making people feel like they are in a fantasy world. The wonder of the Earth Forest is diverse in shape. The earth platforms, earth pillars, earth cliffs, and earth ridges of different sizes, either hanging alone, or arranged in arrays, or graceful, or vigorous, delicate and exquisite, all show the beauty of desolation and solemnity. The value of the Earth Forest lies in its rarity. There are many forests formed by stones, but few are formed by soil. It is like the landform of Yardang and the erosion of the wind river. It is a rare natural teaching material for geological landforms and is known as the natural 'sedimentology laboratory' in North China. Because of their special composition and formation environment, the earth forest landforms are not as long-lasting as the stone forest. They were born in times of abundant water and grass, grew in the decay of strata, and will die under the erosion of wind and sand. From the perspective of the entire earth's evolution process, the earth forest is just a flash in the pan in the long geological evolution history, but for ordinary tourists, it is precisely because of the changeability of the earth forest landscape that they can personally feel the grandeur of the earth's vicissitudes of life.