The Bungle Bungles are a collection of sandstone towers with distinctive orange and dark-gray stripes in Western Australia. Although Indigenous people have inhabited the area since time immemorial, the towers only came to the attention of the rest of the world in the 1980s, when filmmakers recorded them while shooting a documentary.
in 2003.
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The sandstone towers at Purnululu National Park (Purnululu means “sandstone” in the local Indigenous language) are a stunning example of cone karst — landscapes made up of beehive-shaped hills and rocky ground connected to form an area structured like an egg box.
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(DBCA).
The orange and dark-gray stripes are evidence of the Bungle Bungles’ ancient oceanic origins, with each band resulting from a layer of historic seabed. The alternating colors are caused by the presence of either ancient microscopic algae (gray) in moister layers or oxidized iron compounds (orange) in dry layers of rock. In the orange layers, the rock dried out too quickly for the microscopic algae — also known as cyanobacteria, the earliest known form of life on Earth — to grow, according to the DBCA.
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