Uluru

Uluru is a massive sandstone inselberg rising about 348 meters above the surrounding plain in the southern Northern Territory of Australia, composed of arkose, a coarse sandstone rich in feldspar, deposited as alluvial sediment roughly 550 million years ago and later tilted almost vertical by tectonic folding so that its rock layers today stand nearly on end rather than horizontal. Its resistance to erosion compared with the surrounding, now-vanished rock, combined with a hardened outer surface produced by chemical weathering, has left it standing as an isolated monolith after softer surrounding sediment eroded away over hundreds of millions of years, and its deep red color comes from the oxidation, or rusting, of iron-bearing minerals in the rock's surface. Uluru is of profound cultural and spiritual significance to the Anangu, the Aboriginal traditional owners of the land, for whom it is a sacred site bound up with ancestral creation stories; this entity documents Uluru specifically as a named geological formation, a distinct facet from its treatment as a landform and place in the Geography Atlas.