On our drive in western Australia we did see a few cool things besides the flatness of the roads. This giant very white sand dune was one of them.
The termite mounds were some of the other things. These ones looked pretty cool.
That is until we got to this one. It was huge at close to twice the size of Kerri.
On our way back south from Coral Bay we stopped at Shark Bay. The beach was made up of millions of shells.
In fact there are so many shells that they have formed a type of calcium rock that was quarried to build buildings when this area was settled by Europeans.
They have left the quarry as it was from the 1800s.
The closer you get the better you can see that it is just compressed shells that make up the rock.
Past the beach you can see into Hamelin Pool. It is much more saline than the Indian ocean as the water evaporates the salt concentrates. Inside the pool there are really cool living things.
Underneath the water are not rocks, but bacterial mats. There are only a few places in the world that still have these growing mats. As you move from the shore’s edge further out into the pool the type of mat changes as there are tidal differences.
There are mats of these bacteria dated to the earliest timepoints of life on the planet 3.4 billion years ago. These ones are only one to two thousand years old. We were there at mid-high tide so you can’t really see how these mats look compared to the flatter ones that were more reddish.
The mats are made up of many different types of bacterial that all coexist together and overtime they form large structures as sediment gathers and they have to move to be able to reach the sun.
