The pictured puddle’s probable lifespan: a matter of days…or very few weeks.
Age of the creek bed and gorge in which it sits: circa fifty times older than The Grand Canyon!
Photo is copyright Doug Spencer, taken in the Palm Valley section of Finke Gorge National Park in the Western MacDonnell Ranges, at 1.30 pm on 16 June 2023.,
To reach this remarkable place you need a robust 4WD.
It is a circa two hour drive from Alice Springs.
For most of it, you have it very easy – heading west, on well-maintained bitumen.
However, once you turn left/south for the final 16 kilometres, you are driving along the actual bed of the Finke – “the oldest river in the world”, allegedly.
The Colorado River began to carve The Grand Canyon circa 6 million years ago.
The Finke was then already at least 300 million years old.
Future multi-image posts will show and tell much more about Finke River Gorge National Park’s prime attraction.
Spoiler footnote:
Palm Valley is indeed a very ancient geological formation, but its wonderfully “unlikely” palms almost certainly arrived there many millions of years more recently than a lot of people imagine…and our own species was almost certainly responsible for the palms’ presence there.
Homo sapiens is a relatively recent presence in Australia, even the members of “the world’s oldest continuous civilisation”.