Purnululu Bungle Bungle Range

The Bungle Bungle Range, within Purnululu National Park in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, is famous for its cluster of striped, beehive-shaped sandstone domes. The domes are carved from a roughly 350-million-year-old Devonian-age quartz sandstone that was tectonically uplifted and then dissected by streams over about the last 20 million years. Their distinctive alternating orange and grey banding comes from differences in the porosity of individual sedimentary layers: darker grey bands are more porous and retain enough moisture to support a thin surface crust of cyanobacteria and clay, while less porous orange bands lack that crust and are instead oxidized red-orange by iron minerals within the rock. The range was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003.