Tsingy De Bemaraha, Melaky Region, Madagascar

Karst topography is characterized by subterranean limestone caverns, carved by groundwater.The geographer Jovan Cvijić (1865–1927) was born in western Serbia and studied widely in the Dinaric Kras region. His publication of Das Karstphänomen (1893) established that rock dissolution was the key process and that it created most types of dolines, "the diagnostic karst landforms". The Dinaric Kras thus became the type area for dissolutional landforms and aquifers; the regional name kras, Germanicised as "karst", is now applied to modern and paleo-dissolutional phenomena worldwide. Cvijić related the complex behaviour of karstic aquifers to development of solutional conduit networks and linked it to a cycle of landform evolution. After Cvijić, two main kinds of karstic areas exist: holokarst i.e. karst developed at whole as it is Dinaric region along eastern Adriatic coast comprises deep in the inland of Balkan Peninsula and merokarst developed imperfectly with some karstic forms as it is in eastern Serbia. He is recognized as "the father of karst geomorphology".
Different terms for karst topography exist in other languages—for example, yanrong in Chinese and tsingy in Malagasy. The international community has settled on karst, the German name for Kras, a region in Slovenia partially extending into Italy, where it is called "Carso" and where the first scientific research of a karst topography was made. The name has an Indo-European origin (from karra meaning "stone"), and in antiquity it was called "Carusardius" in Latin. The Slovene form grast is attested since 1177, and the Croatian kras since 1230.. "Krš" - "Krsh" meaning in Serbo-Croatian "barren land" which is typical feature in the Northern Dinaric limestone mountains could also be a origin to the word Karst.