Uluru: Fact and Fiction

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UluruFact and Fiction

• Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story

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Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story

• The 'Aboriginal Dreamtime' is that part of
  aboriginal culture which explains the origins and
  culture of the land and its people.
• Aborigines have the longest continuous cultural
  history of any group of people on Earth - dating
  back - by some estimates - 65,000 years.
  Dreamtime is Aboriginal Religion and Culture.
• The Dreamtime contains many parts It is the
  story of things that have happened, how the
  universe came to be, how human beings were
  created and how the Creator intended for humans
  to function within the cosmos.

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Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story

• The expression 'Dreamtime' is most often used to
  refer to the 'time before time', or 'the time of
  the creation of all things', What is certain is
  that 'Ancestor Spirits' came to Earth in human
  and other forms and the land, the plants and
  animals were given their form as we know them
  today.
• These Spirits also established relationships
  between groups and individuals, (whether people
  or animals) and where they travelled across the
  land, or came to a halt, they created rivers,
  hills, etc., and there are often stories attached
  to these places.
• Once their work was done, the Ancestor Spirits
  changed again into animals or stars or hills or
  other objects. For Indigenous Australians, the
  past is still alive and vital today and will
  remain so into the future. The Ancestor Spirits
  and their powers have not gone, they are present
  in the forms into which they changed at the end
  of the 'Dreamtime' or 'Dreaming', as the stories
  tell.

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Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story

• Australian Aboriginal people know that the area
  around Ayers Rock (Mount Uluru) is inhabited by
  dozens of ancestral beings whose activities are
  recorded at many separate sites. At each site,
  the events that took place can be recounted,
  whether those events were of significance or
  whether the ancestral being just rested at a
  certain place before going on.
• Around Ayers Rock (Uluru) there are many examples
  of ancestral sites. The Anangu explanations of
  these sites and of the formation of Ayers Rock
  (Mount Uluru) itself derive from the Tjukurpa. On
  the next slide are some of these stories

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Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story

• Uluru and the Anangu People
• Many Aboriginal elders tell stories about special
  places around Uluru and animals that made them.
  Here is one of those stories from the Dreamtime.
• Long, long ago in the Dreamtime the animals gave
  shape to some of the Rock. At that time a young
  Woma Python, called Kuniya was surprised by a
  group of Liru, which are venomous snakes. The
  Liru threw spears at the python and killed him.
  So hard did they throw their spears, that the
  points made holes in The Rock. The boy's aunt,
  called Kuniya, was so angry that she killed one
  of the Liru with her stick. They made holes in
  the rock when the points of Kuniya's stick hit
  it. You can still see these holes today. Kuniya,
  the Woma Python can still be seen as a dark wavy
  line on Uluru.

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Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story

• Tjati tries to retrieve his kali
• In the creation period, Tatji, the small Red
  Lizard, who lived on the mulgi flats, came to
  Uluru.  He threw his kali, a curved throwing
  stick, and it became embedded in the surface. He
  used his hands to scoop it out in his efforts to
  retrieve his kali, leaving a series of
  bowl-shaped hollows.

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Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story

• The cave where Tjati died at Kantju
• Unable to recover his kali, he finally died in
  this cave. His implements and bodily remains
  survive as large boulders on the cave floor.

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Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story

• In several caves in Uluru, rock represents many
  stories of the Dreamtime. The paintings are
  regularly renewed, with layer upon layer of
  paint, dating back many thousands of years.

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Ayers Rock - Geology Fact and Fiction

• Ayers Rock - A product of Noahs Flood?

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Ayers Rock - Geology Fact and Fiction

• Figure 1 shows water currents bringing in sand,
  supposedly from the Musgrave Ranges to the south.
  The sand pours into a very deep water-filled
  basin whose floor consists of heavily folded and
  eroded older rocks (age of deposition and erosion
  unspecified).
• Figure 2 shows how a "catastrophic flood" filled
  in this basin by dumping
• some 6000 metres (approx. 20, 000 feet) of sand,
  probably in only a matter of hours, after having
  carried this sand some 100 kilometres (63 miles).
  
• The clear implication here is that the basin seen
  in Fig 2 was at least 6000 metres deep! Since
  the beds are now standing vertically, it is also
  obvious that the sand, after being washed into
  the depression, and while still being compressed
  and hardened, was pushed up and tilted by earth
  movements.

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Ayers Rock - Geology Fact and Fiction

• Figure 3 thus depicts the "sand layers tilted
  late in Noah's Flood" with the waters draining
  off and eroding and sculpting the massive
  structure as they went.
• Following the retreat of these flood waters, and
  as the landscape dried, the material in Ayers
  Rocks finally hardened.
• So how was it that this sludgy material was held
  together high above the flood?
• According to Dr Snelling it was not until after
  the Flood waters finally subsided that
• the chemicals in the water between the sand
  grains formed a cementing material to bind the
  mineral grains together, drying in much the same
  way as cement in concrete dries and binds
  together the stones and sand mixed with it. With
  the final retreat of the waters from off the
  land, and the continued drying out of the
  continent, present day desert wind erosion has
  merely pock-marked the surface of the rock.
• Figure 4 shows a cross-section of Ayers Rock
  today, with its relationships to the present land
  surface and desert sands the underlying folded
  and eroded bedrock conveniently disappears from
  the scene.

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Ayers Rock - Geology Fact and Fiction

• Uluru (Ayers Rock) is situated in the Uluru
  National Park, Northern Territory, Australia, it
  is believed to be about 550 million years old.
  Uluru rises 348 metres from the desert and has a
  girth of 9.4 kilometres is the world's most
  famous monolith, yet it is estimated that at
  least two-thirds of the Rock lies beneath the
  surface.
• There is some scientific disagreement about the
  origins of Uluru. The most widely held theory is
  that both Uluru and Kata Tjuta are remnants of a
  vast sedimentary bed which was laid down some 600
  million years ago. The bed was spectacularly
  tilted so that Uluru now protrudes at an angle of
  up to 85. The rock is actually grey but is
  covered with a distinctive red iron oxide coating.

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Ayers Rock - Geology Fact and Fiction

• According to Sweet and Crick (1992, Uluru Kata
  Tjuta  A Geological History), about 550 million
  years ago erosion from the Petermann Ranges led
  to huge alluvial fans (at least 2.5 km in
  vertical thickness) being built up by deposits of
  Arkose sands from the eroded materials of the
  adjacent ranges.
•   
• This close-up view gives an general indication of
  the coarse-grained nature of this
  semi-metamorphosed sandstone, which being more
  resistant to erosion, has allowed Uluru to remain
  a high point in an otherwise largely levelled
  plain.

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Ayers Rock - Geology Fact and Fiction

• Fifty million years later these alluvial fans
  were covered by sediments when the region became
  a shallow sea (isostatic subsidence due to the
  loading caused by these Arkose sand deposits
  playing a role in this process). 
• Then during the period from c. 400 to c. 300
  million years BP, another uplift (the Alice
  Springs Orogeny, which created the Macdonnell
  Ranges to the north of the Uluru area) caused
  massive folding and faulting in the region,
  causing the formerly horizontal strata of the
  Arkose sandstones which comprise Uluru to be
  folded
• nearly vertically from their former position
  (i.e., rotated vertically nearly 90 degrees from
  their original bedding planes).  
• Then subsequent erosion over the past 300 million
  years has led to the uncovering of the Arkose
  sandstones which comprise Uluru and its gradual
  shaping by erosion into the huge 'monolith' which
  we can see there today.   
• The deposits which previously covered the Arkose
  sandstones have largely been eroded away, so that
  'The Rock' stands high over the surrounding
  desert plain because its rock is more resistant
  to erosion than were the rocks which formerly
  covered it. 

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Ayers Rock - Geology Fact and Fiction

• The rocks which form Uluru were probably exposed
  to surface erosion about 70 million years ago,
  the landscape being progressively worn down since
  then.  The diagram below illustrates the current
  geology of the area.
• To Recap Erosion of material from a nearby
  mountain range lead to huge fluvial fans (large
  river features of deposition) this was covered by
  a shallow sea, burying the unsorted sand
  material. 100milion years later uplift caused
  massive folding and faulting and the rocks were
  tilted 89 degrees! The softer material around
  Uluru which was not subjected to part
  metamorphism and is more unconsolidated has been
  eroded, leaving the mass of Arkose Sandstone
  which makes up the Uluru monolith today.