Al Naslaa Rock
Interesting facts
- Its laser-straight cleft made the rock an internet sensation, with online speculation ranging from lasers to aliens, while geologists point to ordinary natural processes.
- Besides a natural joint, geologists have suggested movement along a small fault or freeze-thaw cycles in a cooler, wetter past as ways the first crack could have opened.
- Sand-laden desert winds are thought to have smoothed the walls of the fracture over thousands of years, giving them their almost machined look.
- The narrow pedestals are a classic mushroom-rock form, worn back at the base where windblown sand and moisture in the shaded underside attack the stone hardest.
- The nearby oasis of Tayma appears several times in the Hebrew Bible, including the books of Job and Jeremiah, as a wealthy trading town.
- An Aramaic stele from Tayma listing its gods, found by the explorer Charles Huber in the 1880s, is now in the Louvre.
- By the mid-second millennium BC, Tayma was already enclosed by a massive wall of mudbrick and sandstone.
Why it is worth it
In the desert south of the oasis of Tayma, in northwestern Saudi Arabia, a block of sandstone about 6 metres high and 9 metres wide stands split into two halves by a gap so straight that it looks as if it had been cut with a blade. The two parts rest on small natural pedestals,, and the narrow, even crack between them gives Al Naslaa an almost artificial look.
The cleft follows a joint — a natural fracture plane in the rock — along which the stone has parted. Erosion has since cut back the base of each half, leaving them perched like a pair of mushrooms on slender supports. The precise way the split came to be so clean has been the subject of popular debate, but geologically it is a natural joint: the rock parted along a line of weakness already present in the stone.
The southeastern face of Al Naslaa is covered with petroglyphs, among them horses and ibex, and the surrounding rocks carry more engravings: animals, hunting scenes, human figures and geometric signs. Their age is not known. The area has a long human history. Tayma, about 45 km to the north, was settled by the fourth millennium BC and became one of the great oases of ancient Arabia, a station on the caravan routes linking southern Arabia with Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt; in the sixth century BC the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, used it as his base for campaigns in northwestern Arabia. Today Tayma is one of the largest archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia.
Getting there
Al Naslaa lies about 45 km south of the town of Tayma in Tabuk Province. The nearest airport is AlUla International Airport (ULH), about 95 km to the southwest in a straight line; Tabuk, the provincial capital, lies about 264 km northwest of Tayma.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Al Naslaa rock is a landform 50 kilometres (31 mi) south of the Tayma oasis in Saudi Arabia. It is a large sandstone rock split neatly down the middle into two parts, both balanced on small pedestals. The overall shape of the rock is due to wind erosion and the chemical weathering made possible by the moist conditions in the protected underside of the rock. It is split in two by a joint.
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