40 Fun Facts About Sandstone

Which famous American residence was built of porous Aquia Creek sandstone and sealed with a lime-based coating?

White House walls were whitewashed with lime, rice glue, casein and lead to seal the stone, and that coating gave the building both its colour and its name.

Which ancient city in Jordan, nicknamed the Rose City, was carved straight into sandstone cliffs?

Petra is entered through the Siq, a natural split in the rock that narrows in places to just three or four metres wide.

California's tilted sandstone Vasquez Rocks earned the nickname Kirk's Rock from appearances in which TV series?

Star Trek used the slanted outcrop as an alien world in four episodes of the original series, then came back to it for later films and spin-offs.

Which giant sandstone monolith in Australia's Northern Territory glows red at dawn and sunset?

Uluru stands 348 metres high, yet most of its bulk lies hidden underground.

Which sandstone block used to crown Scottish kings was taken from Westminster Abbey by four students in 1950?

Stone of Scone turned up the following April, left on the altar of Arbroath Abbey by the people who had been hiding it.

Which vast Southeast Asian temple was built from millions of sandstone blocks quarried at Mount Kulen?

Angkor Wat took five to ten million blocks, each weighing up to 1.5 tons, brought from a quarry about 40 km to the northeast.

Under great heat and pressure, sandstone recrystallises into which much harder metamorphic rock?

Quartzite forms when the grains fuse into an interlocking mosaic of crystals, which erases almost all the layering the original sandstone showed.

The Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, the world's largest known store of fossil water, lies beneath which desert?

Sahara sands hide an aquifer shared by Egypt, Libya, Sudan and Chad, and Libya's Great Man-Made River project pumps its ancient water out for farms and cities.

Which landscape of towering sandstone buttes on the Arizona–Utah line became the backdrop for John Ford's Westerns?

Monument Valley's buttes rise up to 1,000 feet above the desert floor on Navajo Nation land, and its Navajo name means valley of the rocks.

Which soft sandstone, quarried heavily at Portland, Connecticut, gave its name to classic New York row houses?

Brownstone was popular because it is unusually easy to quarry and carve, which is also why so many of those house fronts weather and flake.

Table Mountain, a block of hard sandstone often draped in cloud, overlooks which South African city?

Cape Town locals call the cloud that spills over the flat summit the tablecloth; it forms when a south-easterly wind is pushed up the slopes into colder air.

Angel Falls, often called the world's tallest waterfall, drops off a sandstone table mountain in which country?

Venezuela's flat-topped tepuis are the remains of one vast sandstone plateau, and the falls are named after pilot Jimmie Angel, whose plane got stuck on the summit in 1937.

Which Greek World Heritage Site has Orthodox monasteries perched on giant pillars of sandstone and conglomerate?

Meteora once held twenty-four monasteries on its rock towers, most of them founded from the 14th century onward; only a handful are still in use.

A sandstone pillar in which Chinese forest park was renamed Avatar Hallelujah Mountain in honour of the 2009 film?

Zhangjiajie owes its forest of stone pillars largely to ice expanding in cracks each winter and to the plants that root on the rock.

The Three Sisters, sandstone towers above the Jamison Valley near Katoomba, stand in which Australian range?

Blue Mountains scenery is named for the bluish haze over the range, thought to come from oils given off by its vast eucalyptus forests.

Which Egyptian temples, cut into a sandstone cliff for Ramesses II, were moved uphill to escape a rising reservoir?

Abu Simbel was sawn into blocks and rebuilt on higher ground in the 1960s, with the cuts planned at about 6 mm wide so the joins would hardly show.

The pale Coconino Sandstone, known for fossil animal tracks, forms a sheer cliff band high in which American landmark?

Grand Canyon walls expose it as a conspicuous sheer cliff near the top, and the same layer runs south and east to form part of Arizona's Mogollon Rim.

Which American open-air concert venue is naturally formed by two giant tilted sandstone monoliths?

Red Rocks, outside Morrison, Colorado, seats 9,525 people between Ship Rock and Creation Rock, slabs lifted and tilted by the same upheaval that raised the Garden of the Gods.

Hopewell Rocks, flowerpot-shaped sandstone and conglomerate stacks, are swamped twice daily by tides in which inlet?

Bay of Fundy tides have such an extreme range that the bases of the stacks vanish under water, yet visitors can walk among them at low tide.

The crimson, orange and pink streaks of the Navajo Sandstone come from varying amounts of which compound?

Iron oxide, the stuff of rust, fills the pores between the grains, and groundwater has been altering the mix for some 190 million years.

Geologists sort rocks into three great families; sandstone, built from cemented grains, belongs to which one?

Sedimentary sandstone is porous enough to soak up and store huge volumes of fluid, which makes it one of the most valuable rocks for groundwater, oil and gas.

The sweeping slanted layers inside Navajo Sandstone cliffs are the frozen remains of which ancient landscape feature?

Desert dunes piled up here for perhaps ten million years in the Jurassic, when a sea of sand covered some 150,000 square miles of western North America.

Which narrow gorge on Navajo land near Page, Arizona, was carved through sandstone mainly by flash floods?

Antelope Canyon still floods: monsoon rain gathers in the basin above, then picks up speed and sand as it rushes through the narrow passages.

Which Mughal fortress in Delhi, where India's prime minister raises the flag each Independence Day, has sandstone walls?

Red Fort takes its name from the colour of those walls, and Jawaharlal Nehru first hoisted the national flag over its Lahori Gate on 15 August 1947.

Which Indian city's Hawa Mahal, a honeycomb palace front of red and pink sandstone, has 953 small windows?

Jaipur's royal ladies used the latticed windows to watch street life and festivals below without being seen themselves.

The Lion Monument, a dying lion carved into an old sandstone quarry to honour fallen Swiss Guards, is in which city?

Lucerne's lion honours the Swiss Guards killed in 1792 when revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris, and it was designed by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen.

Which French forest, strewn with sandstone boulders, is the biggest and most developed bouldering area in the world?

Fontainebleau gave the sport its Font grading scale, now used at climbing areas around the world, and Parisian climbers knew most of its popular sectors before the Second World War.

Which 137-metre red sandstone sea stack in Scotland's Orkney Islands was first climbed in 1966?

Old Man of Hoy is probably only a few hundred years old, cut from a cliff some time after 1750, and it may soon collapse into the sea.

Cliff Palace, built by Ancestral Puebloans from sandstone blocks and adobe mortar, is the showpiece of which park?

Mesa Verde protects about 600 cliff dwellings tucked into rock alcoves, and Cliff Palace is the largest cliff dwelling in North America.

Utah's Moqui marbles, stone balls that weather out of sandstone, resemble Martian spherules nicknamed after which fruit?

Blueberries was the Opportunity rover team's name for the tiny Martian spheres, while the Utah versions range from the size of peas to the size of baseballs.

Geologists call a sandstone arkose when at least a quarter of its grains are which mineral, common in granite?

Feldspar in bulk points to fast-eroding granite highlands, where rock is broken up physically before chemical weathering can do much.

Britain's Old Red Sandstone, rich in fossils of early fishes, was laid down mostly during which geological period?

Devonian takes its name from Devon, although the rocks of that county formed in the sea and are not counted as part of the Old Red Sandstone.

At Siccar Point in 1788, sandstone lying across older upturned rock convinced which geologist that Earth is ancient?

James Hutton reached the headland by boat with two friends and took the junction as conclusive proof that the land is shaped by slow processes over vast spans of time.

Which German sandstone climbing region bans chalk, nuts and cams, leaving climbers to rely on knotted slings?

Saxon Switzerland's rules protect soft rock that erodes easily, and its climbing history goes back to an 1864 ascent of the Falkenstein by local gymnasts.

Which French cathedral, the world's tallest building until 1874, owes its reddish colour to sandstone from the Vosges?

Strasbourg Cathedral's 142-metre north tower held the height record for 227 years, and it remains the tallest surviving structure built entirely in the Middle Ages.

The St. Peter Sandstone of the American Midwest is prized for its purity by makers of which everyday material?

Glass makers value it because in eastern Missouri the rock is 99.44 percent silica, and its uniform grains are also sold as frac sand for oil and gas wells.

The coarse Carboniferous sandstone of England's Pennines is named after which objects once cut from it?

Millstones made from it went mainly to watermills, and gritstone became the general name for any sandstone made of coarse, angular grains.

Two giant Buddhas hewn from sandstone cliffs in which Afghan valley were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001?

Bamiyan's Buddhas were roughed out of the cliff itself, then finished with details modelled in mud and straw and coated in stucco.

Hegra, where over 110 Nabataean tombs are cut into sandstone, became which country's first UNESCO World Heritage Site?

Saudi Arabia's Hegra marked the southern edge of the Nabataean kingdom, and a dry climate and long abandonment left its tomb fronts remarkably intact.

Itacolumite, a sandstone so flexible that thin slabs sag under their own weight, is named after a peak in which country?

Brazil's Minas Gerais state is home to Itacolomi, and the same bendy rock is a source of the diamonds found in that region.