Strong and silent, the beady eye of the sun, even in winter, sweats over the green kukara oak and tjanpi spinifex. Nearby, a tap dance of dingo paw prints trots a trail over the kumquat terrain, accompanied by a squeak of woodswallow and the chirp of finches. The trees are scraggly; the grasses are stiff; the bush flies swarm and weave. Desert thirst takes hold.
This is the Red Center, home to kangaroo and running emu, imported camel and thorny devil. It is a desert garden of giant rocks rising out of the flatland of the Australian Outback.
One notable inselberg of rock is a stately sandstone slab named Uluru that lofts over the landscape.
To visitors, the 1,000-foot monadnock hews the horizon, especially at sunrise and sunset when the evening red light casts pink on the iron-rich sandstone. To Indigenous peoples, Uluru was created during an epic ancestral battle that caused the Earth such distress that it rose up as a giant rock. To geologists, Uluru and its sister site Kata Tjuta are twisted and tilted mountain tips protruding from 500 million years of Outback outwash.
The outwash first flushed to flatness from prominence beginning 900 million years ago, when all the continents were joined in a supercontinent called Rodinia and the area that would become central Australia was below sea level, surrounded by hills and mountains, making it a receptacle for river runoff and landslides. Neither Uluru nor Kata Tjuta existed; both were mere figments in empty space on a flat but deepening basin floor.
For the next 400 million years, strata of sediment settled in sessile sheets in the swale, synchronizing with the surroundings. When sea level was high, or when the hills were breached, the valley flooded. Sand and silt settled in the seas. When it was hot, the water evaporated and salt flats emerged; when it was cold, severe ice ages that frosted nearly the entire surface of the Earth left glacial scrapings and debris.
Rodinia was fracturing apart 550 million years ago, and the associated tectonic activity tilted some of the flat outwash lands in the basin into new mountainous slopes, seeding Uluru and Kata Tjuta.
Fragments washed from the old sea-bottom at the mountain top to the bottom of the new valley, accreting an apron of pebbles and sand that would eventually loom as Kata Tjuta. To the east, runoff fanned into a separate sandy talus where Uluru would stand. Frequent fluxes of sediment swept down the mountains and over the valley, compressing Uluru and Kata Tjuta into deep rock.
A new era of tectonics 350 million years ago lifted and folded deep Uluru by nearly 90 degrees, from supine to upright, from sandstone sandwich to terrigenous taco, its once horizontal bedding pressed into nearly vertical panels. Kata Tjuta warped 20 degrees. Wind, rain and ice broke off the weakest rocks above both edifices. The looming lofties we see today were more sturdy, more resistant, than the rest of the slipshod mountains, enduring through snow and rain and heat and dark of night.
It would be another 50 million years before primordial North America wedged into proto-Africa to crumple up the Appalachians. It would be 100 million years before the first dinosaur hatched.
Today, the tips of Uluru and Kata Tjuta jut from a mile pile of tawny flatland dust.
The red dust vista sucks you in. The small window of an airplane tries to suck your camera out.
The pilot had suggested we open the windows of the small Cessna to capture photos of the inselbergs in the dawn’s early light. But a moving plane creates a partial vacuum outside an open airplane window, and it nearly sucked my phone out into the eons of the old Red Center.
I flew in a Cessna with Dad when I was a kid, but we never envisioned such a span of epic epochs unfurling on the other side of the world as we cruised the lush rush of the modern megalopolis in New York.
To the sundown observer, the rusty patina of the rocks, a mere foil over the koala gray sands and pebbles, glows like fire opal. Sacred and silent, the golden sky reddens, dimming over Senna didymobotrya and Eucalyptus kruseana, bidding g’day to creeping boobialia and kangaroo grass. Nearby, a slither of mulga-snake winds a trail over terracotta terrain beneath the call of a cockatoo. The tawny-hide Uluru blushes from brown to blaze; the scrappy-barked trees blacken against the peach-streaked sky; a buzz of flies duels with the twangy hiss of field crickets. The colors fade, the temperature drops, Uluru cools to pink. The lume of the limb ignites the west-est roots of the inselbergs. For today, the sun is lost, its day work done, the twilight grayed and limp.
Blackout has taken the Outback.
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