The Geotourism Potential Investigations in Kashmar Area, Khorasan-e-Razavi Province, NE Iran

Subject Areas : Mineralogy

Morteza Taherpour Khalil Abad ¹ , Mohammad Ibrahim Fazel Valipour ² , Habib Allah Torshizian ³ , Vida Taherpour Khalil Abad ⁴ , Shushanik Asmaryan ⁵

1 - Young Researchers Club, Mashhad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Mashhad, Iran.
2 - Department of Geology, Mashhad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Mashhad, Iran.
3 - Department of Geology, Mashhad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Mashhad, Iran.
4 - Department of Geology, Faculty of Sciences, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran.
5 - Laboratory of GIS and Topical mapping at Center for Ecological-Noosphere Studies of NAS RA, Armenia.

Received: 2016-05-31 Accepted : 2016-05-31 Published : 2012-03-20

Keywords:

Abstract :

The remains of the natural and human activities in some parts of the earth register as geopark. Actually, geopark is one or more geological phenomenon which is important from ecology, history, culture and archeological view. The aim of the geotourism description in an area and creating a geopark is trying to keep the earth\'s inheritance and locality the economic of the area. Iran with an old history, diversity of the environment and a lot of geological phenomenon has a great potential in creating geoparks. From this point of view, we can divide it into the five geotourism areas which are as follows: North, South, East, West and Central part of Iran. The Kashmar township is an area which is located in the south part of the Khorasan-e-Razavi province in the Northeast of Iran. This area because of the nearness into the desert, is hot and dry. The area is rich of mines, hot-water springs and geological landscapes. In this research, we tried to introduce some examples of the geotourism features in the study area such as faults, mines, hot-water springs, Bejestan playa, Asyab-e-Khooshab valley, Kavir-e-Lut salt desert, Bijvard entrance, Sar-e-Borj waterfall, Sir and Ahoo Bam caves and Natural glacier.