South China Karst Be A Part of World Natural Heritage

The South China Karst, which is made up of the stone forest inYunnan Province, Libo County in Guizhou Province, and Wulong County inChongqing City, was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List Wednesday.
The site nomination was approved by the ongoing 31st World HeritageCommittee's annual meeting, which convened in Christchurch，New ZealandSaturday.
The 10-day conference will also review sites in danger, sitemanagement and protection, and will acknowledge national tentativelists for possible future World Heritage sites.
Forty nominations for new sites will be debated during this meeting.
In 1972, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and CulturalOrganization (UNESCO) adopted the World Heritage Convention as a way toencourage the identification, protection, and preservation of theworld's most outstanding cultural and natural heritage sites.
With 183 member countries and more than 800 sites, it is one of the most widely supported United Nations conventions.
What is Karst?
Distinctive associations of third-order, erosional landformsindented into second-order structural forms such as plains andplateaus. They are produced by aqueous dissolution, either acting aloneor in conjunction with (and as the trigger for) other erosionprocesses. Karst is largely restricted to the most soluble rocks, whichare salt, gypsum and anhydrite, and limestone and dolostone.
The essence of the karst dynamic system is that meteoric water (rainor snow) is routed underground, because the rocks are soluble, ratherthan flowing off in surface river channels. It follows thatdissolutional caves develop in fracture systems, resurging as springsat the margins of the soluble rocks or in the lowest places. Aconsequence is that most karst topography is "swallowing topography,"assemblages of landforms created to deliver meteoric water down to thecaves.