The Bungle Bungles: Towering domes in the Australian outback that contain traces of the earliest life-forms on Earth

News
By published

The Bungle Bungle Range in Western Australia is a collection of rock domes forged from ancient seabeds and flanked to the northeast by a prehistoric meteor impact crater.

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. (Image credit: Ripple100/Getty Images)
QUICK FACTS

Name: Bungle Bungle Range

Location: Purnululu National Park, Western Australia

Coordinates: -17.488979797868172, 128.37026790005643

Why it's incredible: The rock formations contain traces of the earliest life-forms on Earth.

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.

Related: World's largest iron ore deposits formed over 1 billion years ago in supercontinent breakup

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.

They rise about 980 feet (300 meters) above the grassy plains that surround the Bungle Bungles and sit around 6 miles (10 kilometers) southwest of the Piccaninny crater, a meteor impact structure that formed less than 360 million years ago, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

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. (Image credit: Anja Hennern/Getty Images)

The sandstone itself was deposited roughly 360 million years ago and eroded through the joint action of wind and water over the past 20 million years to form the relief we see today, according to Western Australia's Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (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.

The Bungle Bungles are accessible to the public, with several hiking routes available through the gorges between the striped sandstone domes. The landmark is home to 130 bird species and myriad other native animals, including nail-tail wallabies (Onychogalea) and short-eared rock wallabies (Petrogale brachyotis).

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

Sascha Pare
Sascha Pare
Staff writer

Sascha is a U.K.-based staff writer at Live Science. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Southampton in England and a master’s degree in science communication from Imperial College London. Her work has appeared in The Guardian and the health website Zoe. Besides writing, she enjoys playing tennis, bread-making and browsing second-hand shops for hidden gems.