Like the other shihans, the remainder of the Permian period (late Paleozoic) reef massif formed over 230 million years ago in the tropical sea.

Now the mountain is completely destroyed as a result of geological work to obtain raw materials for Bashkir soda company; in place of the shihan is a quarry.

Activists consider the act of destroying Shakhtau as an example of a barbaric attitude toward nature, and a quarry formed in its place is called a scar on the face of Bashkortostan.

The combination of the primary capricious accumulation of precipitation of reef facies and superposed tectonic processes led to the formation of a body that is very complex in its internal structure.

Earlier (1841), Schachtau was visited by Roderick Murchison and Edmund Verney, who compiled a profile through Shakhtau in the form of a brachyanticlinal fold, complicated by a fault.

Subsequently, paleontological materials on shihan were processed by S. Kutorga, V. Miller, H. G. Pander, and others; F. Chernyshev and N. Gerasimov gave the most complete description of the brachiopods of Shakhtau.

Detailed exploration of Shakhtau with mass drilling was started in 1950s to determine its suitability for soda-cement plant in the city of Sterlitamak.

It was found out that the array is reefogenic, but crumpled into a crease and was significantly eroded, that is, as if excluding each other's assumptions about the genesis of the massif were all partially justified.