Nature's Window
Interesting facts
- Fossil trackways around The Loop form what park managers call Australia's most important trackway site, possibly left by sea scorpions among the first animals on land.
- Overhangs at The Loop look riddled with plant roots, but the tubes are fossil burrows of ancient worms, known as Skolithos.
- Only one body fossil has ever been found in this sandstone: Kalbarria, an early arthropod with eleven pairs of legs.
- One trackway in the sandstone records two animals converging and walking as a single track before one of them veers away to the left.
- Geologists first dated the sandstone to the Cretaceous, about 100 million years ago, before fossils pushed its age back by hundreds of millions of years.
- Its trace fossils closely resemble assemblages from Antarctica, evidence that Western Australia and Antarctica lay close together when the sand was laid down.
- The rocks were not studied scientifically until 1948, because the nearly 1,000 km from Perth ran mostly on dirt tracks until the 1970s.
- Kalbarri National Park receives around 300,000 visits a year, and Nature's Window is counted among Western Australia's best-known natural icons.
- Summer temperatures in the gorge can reach 50 °C, and the inland part of the park is often more than 10 °C hotter than the coast.
Why it is worth it
High on the rim of the Murchison River gorge in Western Australia, wind and weather have hollowed a slab of banded sandstone into a natural arch. Looking through the opening, the frame of red and cream rock layers surrounds a view of the river far below as it swings around The Loop, a long meander inside Kalbarri National Park, with the flat, scrub-covered plateau stretching away beyond.
The rock is the Tumblagooda Sandstone, laid down in the Silurian or Ordovician, between four and five hundred million years ago, by fast braided streams and on sand flats at the edge of the sea. Ripple marks and burrows are preserved in its beds, and some of the trackways found in it have been interpreted as among the earliest evidence of animals walking fully on land. The Murchison, the second longest river in Western Australia at about 820 km, began cutting its gorge no earlier than the late Eocene, and inside the park the canyon runs for nearly 80 km. For much of the year the river barely flows, but cyclone rains can turn it into a flood many kilometres wide.
Kalbarri National Park was created in 1963 and covers more than 1,800 km² of gorge country and coastal cliffs. More than 800 species of wildflowers bloom here from late winter into early summer, some of them found nowhere else, among them the Kalbarri catspaw and local orchids. Western grey kangaroos, echidnas, thorny devils, emus and wedge-tailed eagles live in the park. The land belongs to the traditional country of the Nanda people, whose native title over a large part of the region was recognised in 2018. The town of Kalbarri, at the river mouth, was founded in 1951; the coastal cliffs nearby take their name from the Dutch East India Company ship Zuytdorp, wrecked there in 1712.
Getting there
Nature's Window is in the inland section of Kalbarri National Park, about 33 km in a straight line from the town of Kalbarri, which is linked to Perth by coach. The nearest major airport is Geraldton Airport (GET), about 140 km away.
On these lists
-27.55316, 114.44599per Wikidata