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Cyprus Terrain
The rugged Troodos Mountains, whose principal range
stretches
from Pomos Point in the northwest almost to Larnaca Bay on
the
east, are the single most conspicuous feature of the
landscape.
Intensive uplifting and folding in the formative period
left the
area highly fragmented, so that subordinate ranges and
spurs veer
off at many angles, their slopes incised by steep-sided
valleys. In
the southwest, the mountains descend in a series of
stepped
foothills to the coastal plain.
While the Troodos Mountains are a massif formed of
molten
igneous rock, the Kyrenia Range is a narrow limestone
ridge that
rises suddenly from the plains. Its easternmost extension
becomes
a series of foothills on the Karpas Peninsula. That
peninsula
points toward Asia Minor, to which Cyprus belongs
geologically.
Even the highest peaks of the Kyrenia Range are hardly
more
than half the height of the great dome of the Troodos
massif, Mount
Olympus (1,952 meters), but their seemingly inaccessible,
jagged
slopes make them considerably more spectacular. British
writer
Lawrence Durrell, in Bitter Lemons, wrote of the
Troodos as
"an unlovely jumble of crags and heavyweight rocks" and of
the
Kyrenia Range as belonging to "the world of Gothic Europe,
its
lofty crags studded with crusader castles."
Rich copper deposits were discovered in antiquity on
the slopes
of the Troodos. Geologists speculate that these deposits
may have
originally formed under the Mediterranean Sea, as a
consequence of
the upwelling of hot, mineral-laded water through a zone
where
plates that formed the ocean floor were pulling apart.
Data as of January 1991
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