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Name : Bungle Bungle Range

localisation : Purnululu National Park , Western Australia

Aerial view of the Bungle Bungles in Western Australia. We see towers of orange and gray striped stone with vegetation growing in between.

The Bungle Bungles are towers of sandstone in Western Australia.

Coordinates:-17.488979797868172 , 128.37026790005643

Why it ’s unbelievable : The tilt organisation contain traces of the earliest life sentence - forms on Earth .

The Bungle Bungles are a compendium of sandstone tower with distinctive orange and sullen - gray stripes in Western Australia . Although Indigenous mass have inhabited the area since time immemorial , the tug only came to the attention of the rest of the domain in the 1980s , when filmmakers recorded them while shooting a infotainment .

Aerial wide-angle view of the Bungle Bungle Range in Western Australia. We see nothing in the distance except an arid, flat plain.

The Bungle Bungles were deposited approximately 360 million years ago.

The Bungle Bungles are the principal feature of Purnululu National Park , a protect surface area spanning almost 600,000 Akko ( 240,000 hectares ) in the Kimberley realm . Due to its areas of " incredible natural beauty " and " salient geological economic value , " Purnululu National Park was make aUNESCO World Heritage Sitein 2003 .

concern : World ’s largest iron ore deposit formed over 1 billion years ago in supercontinent breakup

The sandstone column at Purnululu National Park ( Purnululu means " sandstone " in the local Indigenous speech ) are a stunning exemplar of cone karst — landscape made up of beehive - shaped James Jerome Hill and rocky ground tie in to form an area structure like an testicle box .

Scene in Karijini National Park in Western Australia. We see thin trees, a plateau in the distance and dry, red earth.

They rise about 980 feet ( 300 meters ) above the grassy plains that palisade the Bungle Bungles and sit down around 6 naut mi ( 10 kilometers ) southwest of the Piccaninny crater , a shooting star shock social structure that formed less than 360 million years ago , according toNASA ’s Earth Observatory .

The sandstone itself was deposited roughly 360 million years ago and erode through the joint action of wind and water over the past 20 million old age to form the relief we see today , allot to Western Australia’sDepartment of Biodiversity , Conservation and Attractions(DBCA ) .

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The orange and benighted - gray grade insignia are evidence of the Bungle Bungles ' ancient oceanic origins , with each dance orchestra resulting from a layer of historic Davy Jones . The tack colors are because of the presence of either ancient microscopic algae ( gray ) in moister layers or oxidate atomic number 26 compounds ( orangish ) in ironic layer of rock . In the orange layer , the rock dried out too quickly for the microscopic algae — also bang as cyanobacteria , the earliest know material body of life on Earth — to develop , grant to the DBCA .

View of China�s Rainbow Mountains with differently colored bands of sandstone.

The Bungle Bungles are accessible to the world , with several hike routes available through the gorges between the striped sandstone domes . The turning point is dwelling to130 fowl species and myriad other aboriginal animals , including nail - tail wallaby ( Onychogalea ) and short - eared rock wallabies ( Petrogale brachyotis ) .

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