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from Part II - Process geomorphology in the tropics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2012
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Introduction to karst
The word karst denotes a set of special landforms that develop mostly on carbonate rocks due to their high solubility. The rocks, however, do not dissolve uniformly, but mainly along lines of structural weakness such as joints or bedding planes. This happens both at the surface and inside the body of the rock. Water enters the subsurface through openings on the exposed face of the rock and flows through subterranean passages and caves, probably emerging some distance away in springs. As the drainage progressively passes underground, a bare dry stony landscape evolves; this is karst. The word comes from a high barren plateau in western Slovenia where such features are well displayed. The original word kras was later modified to its present germanicised form, karst, which is used to denote similar landscapes anywhere. The publication of Jovan Cvijíc’s book Das Karstphaenomen in 1893 accelerated the study of karst geomorphology.
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