Black Mountain (Kalkajaka) National Park - Natural History

Natural History

The national park's distinctive hard granite boulders and range originally formed out of magma that first slowly solidified under the Earth's crust about 250 million years ago.

The softer land surfaces above the solidified magma eroded away over time, leaving the magma's fractured top to be exposed as a mountain of grey granite boulders blackened by a film of microscopic blue-green algae growing on the exposed surfaces. Colder rains falling on the dark, heated granite boulders causes the boulders to progressively fracture, break, and slowly disintegrate, sometimes explosively.

Read more about this topic:  Black Mountain (Kalkajaka) National Park

Famous quotes containing the words natural and/or history:

    And if anyone should think I am tracing this matter too curiously, I, who have considered it in various shapes, can only answer with Hamlet ... “Not a jot”; it being no more than the natural result of examining and considering the subject.
    Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)

    We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.
    Terry Hands (b. 1941)