If you drive through the Mojave Desert in California, you mostly see flat dirt and scrub brush. But near the small town of Trona, the landscape suddenly breaks.
Hundreds of jagged stone towers shoot straight up out of a dry lakebed. Some of them reach 140 feet high. The whole area looks like a totally alien planet. These are the Trona Pinnacles, and they were actually built completely underwater.
Built Underwater
To figure out how these rocks got here, you have to go back to the last Ice Age. Between 10,000 and 100,000 years ago, this desert was not a desert at all. It was a massive body of water called Searles Lake.
The towers are made of a porous rock called tufa. They formed deep at the bottom of the ancient lake. Calcium-rich groundwater naturally bubbled up from below the Earth’s surface. When that calcium came into contact with the lake’s alkaline water, a chemical reaction occurred immediately.
Calcium and carbonate bond together to form solid calcium carbonate, or limestone. Over thousands of years, this chemical reaction kept piling up new rock layer by layer. The towers slowly grew taller and taller while staying completely submerged.
A Dried-Up World
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Eventually, the ice age ended. The climate warmed up, and the heavy rains stopped falling. Searles Lake slowly evaporated into thin air.
When the water disappeared, it left the massive tufa towers exposed in the middle of a dry, dusty basin. There are over 500 of these spires grouped together. Because the landscape looks so strange, Hollywood uses it constantly. If you watch old movies like Star Trek V or Planet of the Apes, you will see these exact rocks in the background.
Slowly Falling Apart
Tufa rock is basically just a chemical sponge. It is not incredibly strong like granite or basalt.
Because these towers are no longer protected by water, desert weather constantly beats them up. High winds blow sand against the rocks, acting like sandpaper. Occasional earthquakes rattle the weak stone. You can see chunks of the spires that have snapped off and crashed onto the dirt below.
The pinnacles are slowly crumbling back into the earth. But for now, they stand as a massive chemical accident frozen in the middle of the desert.
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