The Bungle Bungles are a group of sandstone towers located in Western Australia. (Photo by Ripple100/Getty Images)
Bungle Bungle is a collection of sandstone towers with distinctive orange and dark grey stripes in Western Australia. Although the area has been inhabited by Indigenous people since ancient times, the towers only came to the attention of the world in the 1980s when they were filmed for a documentary.
Bungle Bungle is the main attraction of Purnululu National Park, a protected area covering almost 600,000 acres (240,000 hectares) in the Kimberley region. Due to its “outstanding natural beauty” and “outstanding geological significance”, Purnululu National Park was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003.
The sandstone towers of Purnululu National Park (Purnululu means 'sandstone' in the local Aboriginal language) are a spectacular example of cone karst – a landscape of beehive-shaped hills and rocky soil that are joined together to create an area resembling an egg cell.
They rise about 980 feet (300 meters) above the surrounding grassy plains and are located about 6 miles (10 kilometers) southwest of Piccaninny Crater, an impact crater that formed less than 360 million years ago, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.
The Bungle Bungle deposits were formed approximately 360 million years ago.
According to the Western Australian Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA), the sandstone itself was formed approximately 360 million years ago and has been eroded by wind and water over the past 20 million years to form the landforms we see today.
The orange and dark grey bands indicate Bungle Bungle’s ancient oceanic origins, with each band representing a layer of historic seafloor. The alternating colours are due to either ancient microscopic algae (grey) in the wet layers or oxidised iron compounds (orange) in the dry layers of rock. In the orange layers, the rock dried too quickly to allow the growth of microscopic algae – known as qi
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