Many have a bad impression of the rocky corners of the Earth. Maybe the travelers are to blame here, who left us their descriptions, compiled under the influence of a tedious journey and thirst? Naturally, such descriptions are dominated by gray colors and the emphasis is on the monotony of stones, rocks, ledges, placers. But in fact, the world of stone nature is diverse, amazing, colorful and worthy of admiration. They say that in such places there is nothing to catch your eye. Do other mountains with their cliffs not resemble the sophisticated work of architects who create temples in the Gothic style? And aren't there picturesque contrasts here, like exhibits from the Cabinet of Curiosities, or just the quirks of the time that worked together with the wind and water streams over the rock material?
Our Przewalski has a deep thought that stones and rocks, even in deep gorges, even in deserts, are romantic, provide food for philosophizing about the forces of nature and the eternity of its elements, the mysteries of the deep past of the planet and the metamorphoses of its surface. They are one of the true wonders of the world.
Indeed, on the plains and among mountain ridges, under water and in deserts, stones processed by the forces of nature are sometimes a work of art. Mother Nature is everywhere showing her wild imagination. A corner in one of the least explored deserts of Australia, included in the Nambung National Park, can be considered a kind of architectural miracle.
"Absolute geological anomaly", as the American geophysicist, naturalist and author of natural history books Thomas Ulsman called the Australian desert of spiers in the southwest of the continent. - I have seen the sandy expanses of almost all continents, but this has no analogues on the planet. One might get the impression that it was created by Salvator Dali as a surreal eighth wonder of the world."
The desert is located in a conservation area 150 miles north of the city of Perth. Imagine a plain of golden color, where thousands of stone cliffs, pillars, columns, spiers protrude from the fine sand. Some of them are as tall as a man, others are no more than a little finger in height. A huge park of stone sculptures!
If you dig in shaky ground, you can make sure that all the spiers go down to a great depth. From above, only the tops are visible, like those of icebergs. Some of them are smooth, others are rough, like emery, and others are porous. No two are alike, all are different. There are also those in which the wind and sand have already made through holes.
These are the wonders in the desert of spiers. The wind with countless grains of sand drilled the "eye of a needle" into the obelisk
In the mornings, when the southern sun gives these peaked rooms a long shadow, the picture is fantastic. Some people see it as the flattened skin of a giant zebra.
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When a rare cloud comes over here, a play of colors begins - the stones turn from light to brown granite or grayish marble with sparkles. At sunset, they can be purple, lemon, purple. Such color metamorphoses have not yet been solved.
When a sandstorm rises, the pictures here take on the appearance of shots from a horror movie. The blue sky turns purple, a monstrously sharp roar begins, as if the columns and spiers themselves were screaming. Their tops become like volcanoes, spewing up streams of orange smoke. In fact, these are spinning grains of sand from the bizarre elements of the wind. There are times when organ music sounds like it sounds in this desert …
The oncoming storm ends, and you can carry out an inventory of the spiers: some have gone under the dunes, while others have grown by a whole meter.
No, these are not petrified tree trunks of past eras. And not the ruins of megalithic buildings. And not stalagmites. Here is something completely different - the play of the forces of nature on the site of the former ocean floor.
Underwater Gothic Obelisks in the Pacific Ocean
Geologists explain the origin of the artistically carved spiers prosaically: the result of centuries of erosion of a massive limestone slab under the dunes. Rainwater penetrated down here in irregular rivulets, dissolving the mineral surface so that peaked columns formed on it. All of this took place underground. Then the work of the winds from the Indian Ocean gradually carried away the top layer of sand to the north and east - and now Gothic spiers appeared from the ground.
Pillar-shaped rocks on a mountain pass in Tajikistan
If you break these stones, naturally, for scientific purposes, you can find the remains of algae, corals, shells, sea animals inside. All of this suggests that the limestone beneath the sand is a sedimentary rock on the ocean floor at a depth of about ten meters. According to geologists, there is a rich "ore" for paleontologists directly under the limestone slab and inside it. But no one has dug deep here yet. However, there were few botanists and zoologists. There is still no explanation why animals and birds rarely come to this area, willingly living in neighboring desert areas, however, without stones sticking out of the ground …
History itself, shattered into pieces: fragments of Egyptian obelisks
The age of the desert with columns and spiers is still mysterious. Some believe that she is relatively young - she is only 25 thousand years old or a little more. Others ardently argue that one should speak of at least two million years. So far, one thing is clear: most of the sand is continuously renewed here, it is brought in by natural forces from the bottom of the Indian Ocean. And its mass comes from year to year - the desert grows in a northeast direction, moving, as it were, towards the geographical center of Australia. Alas, the Sahara, the Kalahari and the Atacama are growing. Africa will soon be 80% desert. And it is worth remembering here the words of Frederic Joliot-Curie, said by him more than forty years ago: “Humanity should spend money not on atomic bombs, but on the fight against the onset of the sands. The Sahara could be one big blooming oasis."