Eger Graben
Encyclopedia
The Eger Graben is a geographical unit in the Czech Republic
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....

. It runs southwards, parallel to the Ore Mountains (Krušné Hory) and its formation is linked with that of the mountain range.

Topography

The Eger flows through the Eger Graben
Graben
In geology, a graben is a depressed block of land bordered by parallel faults. Graben is German for ditch. Graben is used for both the singular and plural....

 and separates the Ore Mountains from the Kaiserwald
Kaiserwald
Kaiserwald was a Nazi German concentration camp near the Riga suburb of Mežaparks in Latvia.Kaiserwald was built in March, 1943, during the period that the German army occupied Latvia...

 and the Doupov Mountains. The trench continues to the northeast along the valley of the Bílina and later, as the North Bohemian Basin
North Bohemian Basin
The North Bohemian Basin is a landscape in North Bohemia . It forms the western part of the Aussig region .- Adjacent landscapes :...

, separates the Ore Mountains from the Bohemian Central Mountains, where the River Eger leaves the graben and flows into the Elbe south of the Bohemian Mountains.

Geology

The Eger Graben is part of the European Cenozoic Rift System
European Cenozoic Rift System
The European Cenozoic Rift System is an 1100 km long system of rifts formed in the foreland of the Alps as the lithosphere responded to the effects of the Alpine and Pyrenean orogenies...

 and was created geologically on the same principle as the Rhine Rift Valley. It was formed by the almost complete erosion of the Variscan Mountains
Variscan orogeny
The Variscan orogeny is a geologic mountain-building event caused by Late Paleozoic continental collision between Euramerica and Gondwana to form the supercontinent of Pangaea.-Naming:...

 and sits on on a fault-block caused by the horizontal pressure of the African continental plate. This block dropped, however, in contrast to the surrounding area. The Ore Mountains are fault-block mountains which rise very gently in Germany, but drop very steeply into the Eger Graben. The trench thus follows the main fault line of the Ore Mountains.

Sources

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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