2006/08 Australia trip - Hamelin Pool |
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Tuesday August 1st
The sun was back. We made one more stop at the beach to see the dolphins fed, guaranteeing a late getaway for us. Sandie wanted a haircut, so we stopped in Denham, which looked a little livelier on a Tuesday morning, but the hairdresser was closed.
We drove the hundred miles or so back to the main highway, stopping at Hamelin Pool on the way. Hamelin is a super salty 
lagoon and it has two geological oddities. The first is a beach made completely of shells that have been cemented into rock. The rock was quarried at one time and used for building, like cinder blocks. The stuff looks like a rice crispie bar, but it’s a little bit tougher. Kids with pencils could probably put holes in your house though!
The other oddity is the colony of stromatolites. These are “living rocks” formed in the lagoon’s tidal zone by cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), the descendents of the fossilized ones we’d seen in Gregory, and those were tens of millions of years old. Stromatolites are thought to be the world’s oldest fossils; billions of years ago they were responsible for generating the oxygen that allowed more complex life forms to develop. These living stromatolites were still producing a froth of oxygen bubbles. Today there are only a few places in the word where they continue to live. (Since our trip I’ve found that more have been discovered, including some in the depths of Minnesota lakes!)
The science is interesting, but other than the froth and the rocks, there isn’t much happening in the colony. Living rocks are still just rocks. Watching stromatolites is a few orders of magnitude slower than watching grass grow. Perhaps we should coin a new word “stromatose”, meaning one step quieter than comatose.
We rejoined the North West coastal highway and headed south with occasional stops for flowers. Even in this extremely dry country there seemed to be more flowers popping out every day. Towards the end of the day we began to see a change in the environment: more greenery and larger trees than we had seen for a month or so. There were even a few fields that looked like they held crops at some time in the year.
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Murchison River (3.12) |
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We camped at Galena Bridge, a rest area on the Murchison River. I went for a walk along the river, which was still flowing, and can report another change: dust and sand had been replaced by sticky clay.