What Does The Devils Marbles Look Like

The devils marbles are an iconic landmark in australia s outback.

What does the devils marbles look like.

It is a sacred site for them and the reserve is actually considered to be a dangerous area for many aboriginal men and women. The natural processes of weathering and erosion have created the various shapes of the boulders. The outer skins eventually cracked and fell off rounding the boulders so they look like peeling onions. The name is quite unfair suggesting that this place has been created by a hellish being to trick the weary outback traveller or to give them the wrong impression of safety.

Karlu karlu these are great granite boulders that have been strewn across a flat valley commonly known as the devil s marbles. How were devils marbles formed. The sizes vary massively and some are still more rectangular than others. A dreaming story says the devil man created these features when he left twirled clusters of hair on the ground that became round boulders.

The devils marbles are one of those legendary outback places that everyone wants to visit and take a photo. For the local aboriginal people the devils marbles or karlu karlu are a key part of the creation story. Back then they had none of that. The net result is the piles of perched and rounded granite boulders or tors.

The devils marbles are large granitic boulders that form the exposed top layer of an extensive and mostly underground granite formation. Standing at up to 6 metres high and formed over millions of years they continue to crack and change. They blew my mind even though i had a vague understanding of why and how they were here. We ve all seen the photos of someone surfing on one of the marbles or someone else holding one in their hand you know those big red boulders that are somewhere in the outback.

Actually they vary in size from 50 cm up to six metres across and they are strewn across a large area. The devil s marbles started life nearly 2 billion years ago as the magma cooled in the earth s crust to form the igneous rock granite. The local indigenous australians call the region karlu karlu round boulders and consider it a sacred site. On top of the granite a thick sedimentary layer of sandstone formed that compressed the granite under its immense weight.

These processes together are thus called spheroidal or onionskin weathering.