Stura di Demonte
Stura di Demonte is a 115-kilometre long river in northwestern Italy. The river is a tributary to the river Tanaro, a tributary of the river Po, its source is near the border with France. It flows through Cuneo before joining the Tanaro just east of Cherasco. Stura di Demonte Valley Media related to Stura di Demonte at Wikimedia Commons
Liguria
Liguria is a coastal region of north-western Italy. The region coincides with the Italian Riviera and is popular with tourists for its beaches and cuisine; the name Liguria predates Latin and is of obscure origin, however the Latin adjectives Ligusticum and Liguscus reveal the original -sc- in the root ligusc-, which shortened to -s- and turned into -r- in the Latin name Liguria according to rhotacism. The formant -sc- is present in the names Etruscan, Gascony and is believed by some researchers to relate to maritime people or sailors. Compare Greek Lígus λίγυς, a Ligurian, a person from Liguria, whence Ligustikḗ λιγυστική, the name of the place Liguria. Liguria is bordered by France to the west, Piedmont to the north, Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany to the east, it lies on the Ligurian Sea. The narrow strip of land is bordered by the Alps and the Apennines mountains; some mountains rise above 2,000 m. The highest point of the region is the summit of Monte Saccarello; the winding arched extension goes from Ventimiglia to La Spezia.
Of this, 3,524.08 km2 are mountainous and 891.95 km2 are hills. Liguria's natural reserves cover 600 km2 of land, they are made up of one national reserve, six large parks, two smaller parks and three nature reserves. The continental shelf is narrow, so steep it descends immediately to considerable depths along its 350-kilometre coastline. Except for the Portovenere and Portofino promontories, the coast is not jagged, is high. At the mouths of the biggest watercourses are small beaches, but there are no deep bays and natural harbours except at Genoa and La Spezia; the hills lying beyond the coast together with the sea account for a mild climate year-round. Average winter temperatures are 7 to 10 °C and summer temperatures are 23 to 24 °C, which make for a pleasant stay in the dead of winter. Rainfall can be abundant at times, as mountains close to the coast create an orographic effect. Genoa and La Spezia can see up to 2,000 mm of rain in a year. According to classical sources, the Ligurians once lived in a far broader territory than present-day Liguria.
For example, the Greek colony of Massalia, modern Marseille, was recorded to lie in Ligurian territory. During the first Punic War, the ancient Ligurians were divided, some of them siding with Carthage and a minority with Rome, whose allies included the future Genoese. Under Augustus, Liguria was designated a region of Italy stretching from the coast to the banks of the Po River; the great Roman roads helped increase communication and trade. Important towns developed on the coast, of which evidence is left in the ruins of Albenga and Luni. Between the 4th and the 10th centuries Liguria was dominated by the Byzantines, the Lombards of King Rothari and the Franks, it was invaded by Saracen and Norman raiders. In the 10th century, once the danger of pirates decreased, the Ligurian territory was divided into three marches: Obertenga and Aleramica. In the 11th and 12th centuries the marches were split into fees, with the strengthening of the bishops’ power, the feudal structure began to weaken; the main Ligurian towns on the coast, became city-states, over which Genoa soon extended its rule.
Inland, fiefs belonging to noble families survived for a long time. Between the 11th century and the 15th century, the Republic of Genoa experienced an extraordinary political and commercial success, it was one of the most powerful maritime republics in the Mediterranean from the 12th to the 14th century: after the decisive victory in the battle of Meloria, it acquired control over the Tyrrhenian Sea and was present in the nerve centres of power during the last phase of the Byzantine empire, having colonies up to Black Sea and Crimean. After the introduction of the title of doge for life and the election of Simone Boccanegra, Genoa resumed its struggles against the Marquis of Finale and the Counts of Laigueglia and it conquered again the territories of Finale and Porto Maurizio. In spite of its military and commercial successes, Genoa fell prey to the internal factions which put pressure on its political structure. Due to the vulnerable situation, the rule of the republic went to the hands of the Visconti family of Milan.
After their expulsion by the popular forces under Boccanegra’s lead, the republic remained in Genoese hands until 1396, when the internal instability led the doge Antoniotto Adorno to surrender the title of Seignior of Genoa to the king of France. The French were driven away in 1409 and Liguria went back under Milanese control in 1421, thus remaining until 1435; the alternation of French and Milanese dominions over Liguria went on until the first half of the 16th century. The French influence ceased in 1528, when Andrea Doria allied with the powerful king of Spain and imposed an aristocratic government, which gave the republic a relative stability fo
Col de Tende
Col de Tende is a high mountain pass in the Alps, close to the border between France and Italy, although the highest section of the pass is wholly within France. It separates the Maritime Alps from the Ligurian Alps, it connects Tende in Alpes-Maritimes with Cuneo in Piedmont. A railway tunnel inaugurated in 1898 and a Road Tunnel inaugurated in 1882 run under the pass; the latter tunnel is among the oldest long road tunnels. French historian François Guizot states that the road was first developed by Phoenicians and maintained by Greeks and Romans. But, at the end of three or four centuries, these colonies fell into decay. After the withdrawal of the Phoenicians this road was kept up and repaired, at first by the Greeks of Marseilles, subsequently by the Romans. List of highest paved roads in Europe List of mountain passes France–Italy border Main chain of the Alps Profile on climbbybike.com Alan Heath - Col de Tende
France
France the French Republic, is a country whose territory consists of metropolitan France in Western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The metropolitan area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean, it is bordered by Belgium and Germany to the northeast and Italy to the east, Andorra and Spain to the south. The overseas territories include French Guiana in South America and several islands in the Atlantic and Indian oceans; the country's 18 integral regions span a combined area of 643,801 square kilometres and a total population of 67.3 million. France, a sovereign state, is a unitary semi-presidential republic with its capital in Paris, the country's largest city and main cultural and commercial centre. Other major urban areas include Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nice. During the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by a Celtic people. Rome annexed the area in 51 BC, holding it until the arrival of Germanic Franks in 476, who formed the Kingdom of Francia.
The Treaty of Verdun of 843 partitioned Francia into Middle Francia and West Francia. West Francia which became the Kingdom of France in 987 emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages following its victory in the Hundred Years' War. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a global colonial empire was established, which by the 20th century would become the second largest in the world; the 16th century was dominated by religious civil wars between Protestants. France became Europe's dominant cultural and military power in the 17th century under Louis XIV. In the late 18th century, the French Revolution overthrew the absolute monarchy, established one of modern history's earliest republics, saw the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which expresses the nation's ideals to this day. In the 19th century, Napoleon established the First French Empire, his subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a tumultuous succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870.
France was a major participant in World War I, from which it emerged victorious, was one of the Allies in World War II, but came under occupation by the Axis powers in 1940. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and dissolved in the course of the Algerian War; the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, remains today. Algeria and nearly all the other colonies became independent in the 1960s and retained close economic and military connections with France. France has long been a global centre of art and philosophy, it hosts the world's fourth-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and is the leading tourist destination, receiving around 83 million foreign visitors annually. France is a developed country with the world's sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP, tenth-largest by purchasing power parity. In terms of aggregate household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, human development.
France is considered a great power in global affairs, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a leading member state of the European Union and the Eurozone, a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, La Francophonie. Applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name "France" comes from the Latin "Francia", or "country of the Franks". Modern France is still named today "Francia" in Italian and Spanish, "Frankreich" in German and "Frankrijk" in Dutch, all of which have more or less the same historical meaning. There are various theories as to the origin of the name Frank. Following the precedents of Edward Gibbon and Jacob Grimm, the name of the Franks has been linked with the word frank in English, it has been suggested that the meaning of "free" was adopted because, after the conquest of Gaul, only Franks were free of taxation.
Another theory is that it is derived from the Proto-Germanic word frankon, which translates as javelin or lance as the throwing axe of the Franks was known as a francisca. However, it has been determined that these weapons were named because of their use by the Franks, not the other way around; the oldest traces of human life in what is now France date from 1.8 million years ago. Over the ensuing millennia, Humans were confronted by a harsh and variable climate, marked by several glacial eras. Early hominids led a nomadic hunter-gatherer life. France has a large number of decorated caves from the upper Palaeolithic era, including one of the most famous and best preserved, Lascaux. At the end of the last glacial period, the climate became milder. After strong demographic and agricultural development between the 4th and 3rd millennia, metallurgy appeared at the end of the 3rd millennium working gold and bronze, iron. France has numerous megalithic sites from the Neolithic period, including the exceptiona
Orogeny
An orogeny is an event that leads to both structural deformation and compositional differentiation of the Earth's lithosphere at convergent plate margins. An orogen or orogenic belt develops when a continental plate crumples and is pushed upwards to form one or more mountain ranges. Orogeny is the primary mechanism; the word "orogeny" comes from Ancient Greek. Although it was used before him, the term was employed by the American geologist G. K. Gilbert in 1890 to describe the process of mountain building as distinguished from epeirogeny; the formation of an orogen can be accomplished by the tectonic processes such as oceanic subduction or continental subduction convergence of two or more continents for collisional orogeny). Orogeny produces long arcuate structures, known as orogenic belts. Orogenic belts consist of long parallel strips of rock exhibiting similar characteristics along the length of the belt. Although orogenic belts are associated with subduction zones, subduction tectonism may be ongoing or past processes.
The subducting tectonism would consume crust, thicken lithosphere, produce earthquake and volcanoes, build island arcs in many cases. Geologists attribute the arcuate structure to the rigidity of the descending plate, island arc cusps relate to tears in the descending lithosphere; these island arcs may be added to a continental margin during an accretionary orogeny. On the other hand, subduction zones may be reworked at a time due to lithospheric rifting, leading to amphibolite to granulite facies metamorphism of the thinned orogenic crust; the processes of orogeny can take tens of millions of years and build mountains from plains or from the seabed. The topographic height of orogenic mountains is related to the principle of isostasy, that is, a balance of the downward gravitational force upon an upthrust mountain range and the buoyant upward forces exerted by the dense underlying mantle. Rock formations that undergo orogeny are deformed and undergo metamorphism. Orogenic processes may push buried rocks to the surface.
Sea-bottom and near-shore material may cover all of the orogenic area. If the orogeny is due to two continents colliding high mountains can result. An orogenic event may be studied: as a tectonic structural event, as a geographical event, as a chronological event. Orogenic events: cause distinctive structural phenomena related to tectonic activity affect rocks and crust in particular regions, happen within a specific period In general, there are two main types of orogens at convergent plate margins: accretionary orogens, which were produced by subduction of one oceanic plate beneath one continental plate to result in either continental arc magmatism or the accretion of island arc terranes to continental margins. An orogeny produces an orogen, but a range-foreland basin system is only produced on passive plate margins; the foreland basin forms ahead of the orogen due to loading and resulting flexure of the lithosphere by the developing mountain belt. A typical foreland basin is subdivided into a wedge-top basin above the active orogenic wedge, the foredeep beyond the active front, a forebulge high of flexural origin and a back-bulge area beyond, although not all of these are present in all foreland-basin systems.
The basin migrates with the orogenic front and early deposited foreland basin sediments become progressively involved in folding and thrusting. Sediments deposited in the foreland basin are derived from the erosion of the uplifting rocks of the mountain range, although some sediments derive from the foreland; the fill of many such basins shows a change in time from deepwater marine through shallow water to continental sediments. Although orogeny involves plate tectonics, the tectonic forces result in a variety of associated phenomena, including crustal deformation, crustal thickening, crustal thinning and crustal melting as well as magmatism and mineralization. What happens in a specific orogen depends upon the strength and rheology of the continental lithosphere, how these properties change during orogenesis. In addition to orogeny, the orogen is subject to other processes, such as erosion; the sequence of repeated cycles of sedimentation and erosion, followed by burial and metamorphism, by crustal anatexis to form granitic batholiths and tectonic uplift to form mountain chains, is called the orogenic cycle.
For example, the Caledonian Orogeny refers to a series of tectonic events due to the continental collision of Laurentia with Eastern Avalonia and other former fragments of Gondwana in the Early Paleozoic. The Caledonian Orogen resulted from these events and various others that are part of its peculiar orogenic cycle. In summary, an orogeny is an episode of deformation and magmatism at convergent plate margins, during which many geological processes play a role at convergent plate margins; every orogeny has its own orogenic cycle, but composite orogenesis is common at convergent plate margins. Erosion represents a subsequent phase of the orogenic cycle. Erosion removes much of the mountains
Mountain range
A mountain range or hill range is a series of mountains or hills ranged in a line and connected by high ground. A mountain system or mountain belt is a group of mountain ranges with similarity in form and alignment that have arisen from the same cause an orogeny. Mountain ranges are formed by a variety of geological processes, but most of the significant ones on Earth are the result of plate tectonics. Mountain ranges are found on many planetary mass objects in the Solar System and are a feature of most terrestrial planets. Mountain ranges are segmented by highlands or mountain passes and valleys. Individual mountains within the same mountain range do not have the same geologic structure or petrology, they may be a mix of different orogenic expressions and terranes, for example thrust sheets, uplifted blocks, fold mountains, volcanic landforms resulting in a variety of rock types. Most geologically young mountain ranges on the Earth's land surface are associated with either the Pacific Ring of Fire or the Alpide Belt.
The Pacific Ring of Fire includes the Andes of South America, extends through the North American Cordillera along the Pacific Coast, the Aleutian Range, on through Kamchatka, Taiwan, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, to New Zealand. The Andes is 7,000 kilometres long and is considered the world's longest mountain system; the Alpide belt includes Indonesia and Southeast Asia, through the Himalaya, Caucasus Mountains, Balkan Mountains fold mountain range, the Alps, ends in the Spanish mountains and the Atlas Mountains. The belt includes other European and Asian mountain ranges; the Himalayas contain the highest mountains in the world, including Mount Everest, 8,848 metres high and traverses the border between China and Nepal. Mountain ranges outside these two systems include the Arctic Cordillera, the Urals, the Appalachians, the Scandinavian Mountains, the Great Dividing Range, the Altai Mountains and the Hijaz Mountains. If the definition of a mountain range is stretched to include underwater mountains the Ocean Ridges form the longest continuous mountain system on Earth, with a length of 65,000 kilometres.
The mountain systems of the earth are characterized by a tree structure, where mountain ranges can contain sub-ranges. The sub-range relationship is expressed as a parent-child relationship. For example, the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Blue Ridge Mountains are sub-ranges of the Appalachian Mountains. Equivalently, the Appalachians are the parent of the White Mountains and Blue Ridge Mountains, the White Mountains and the Blue Ridge Mountains are children of the Appalachians; the parent-child expression extends to the sub-ranges themselves: the Sandwich Range and the Presidential Range are children of the White Mountains, while the Presidential Range is parent to the Northern Presidential Range and Southern Presidential Range. The position of mountains influences climate, such as snow; when air masses move up and over mountains, the air cools producing orographic precipitation. As the air descends on the leeward side, it warms again and is drier, having been stripped of much of its moisture.
A rain shadow will affect the leeward side of a range. Mountain ranges are subjected to erosional forces which work to tear them down; the basins adjacent to an eroding mountain range are filled with sediments which are buried and turned into sedimentary rock. Erosion is at work while the mountains are being uplifted until the mountains are reduced to low hills and plains; the early Cenozoic uplift of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado provides an example. As the uplift was occurring some 10,000 feet of Mesozoic sedimentary strata were removed by erosion over the core of the mountain range and spread as sand and clays across the Great Plains to the east; this mass of rock was removed as the range was undergoing uplift. The removal of such a mass from the core of the range most caused further uplift as the region adjusted isostatically in response to the removed weight. Rivers are traditionally believed to be the principal cause of mountain range erosion, by cutting into bedrock and transporting sediment.
Computer simulation has shown that as mountain belts change from tectonically active to inactive, the rate of erosion drops because there are fewer abrasive particles in the water and fewer landslides. Mountains on other planets and natural satellites of the Solar System are isolated and formed by processes such as impacts, though there are examples of mountain ranges somewhat similar to those on Earth. Saturn's moon Titan and Pluto, in particular exhibit large mountain ranges in chains composed of ices rather than rock. Examples include the Mithrim Montes and Doom Mons on Titan, Tenzing Montes and Hillary Montes on Pluto; some terrestrial planets other than Earth exhibit rocky mountain ranges, such as Maxwell Montes on Venus taller than any on Earth and Tartarus Montes on Mars, Jupiter's moon Io has mountain ranges formed from tectonic processes including Boösaule Montes, Dorian Montes, Hi'iaka Montes and Euboea Montes. Peakbagger Ranges Home Page Bivouac.com
Cime du Gélas
Cime du Gélas is a 3,143 m high mountain on the boundary between France and Italy. It is part of the Maritime Alps, it is the highest peak of the Mercantour National Park, while on the Italian side it is included in the Maritime Alps Natural Park. Geologically, it is part of the Mercantour-Argentera massif, is formed by granitoid gneiss; the peak is composed of two smaller ones, divided by a gorge. The mountain's name derives from the glaciers which occupy its northern slopes, which have however reduced during the late 20th century. Italian official cartography.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Coolidge, William Augustus Brevoort (1911). . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 1 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 741.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the 
