The White Desert (Sahara el Beyda), Egypt: Bulbous white rocks in strange shapes and sizes rise from the desert about 28 miles north of the town of Farafra in western Egypt—a cluster of mushrooms here, a herd of half-melted snowmen over there. Their appearance isn’t due to some avant-garde stone sculptor, but rather thanks to the wind. When the ancient sea that once covered the land dried up, the remaining sediment layer began to break down. The softer spots crumbled away, and over time, powerful sandstorms shaped the harder rocks into their current forms.
Marble Caves, Chile: Six thousand years of wave erosion created the undulating patterns that give these caves their marbleized effect, enhanced by the reflection of the blue and green water of Carrera Lake, near Chile’s border with Argentina. Although the area is threatened by a plan to build a dam nearby, for now, visitors can kayak throughout the caves on days when the waters are calm.
White Sands National Monument, New Mexico, USA: There are sugar-white dunes moving through the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico at a rate of nearly 30 feet per year. As the mineral-rich water of nearby Lake Lucero evaporates, it forms gypsum deposits that are then shaped by the wind into these dunes. Since the early 1900s, visitors have been here to hike; ranger tours and bus tours along the 16-mile Dunes Drive are also offered through the National Parks Service.
Travertine Pools at Pamukkale, Turkey: People have sought the reputed healing effects of bathing here for thousands of years. The water that flows from 17 subterranean hot springs into the pools has an extremely high concentration of calcium carbonate, which forms soft deposits when it hits the surface. Those viscous white deposits harden over time until the springs resemble a fountain made of chalk or, as indicated by the poetic translation of Pamukkale, a “cotton castle” visible from more than 10 miles away.
The Wave at Coyote Buttes, Arizona and Utah, USA: Wind and rain have worked their magic, eroding lines that swoop and swirl across the sandstone formation. The result, which resembles a cresting wave, is one of the most photographed—if not easy to reach—spots in the American West. A permit is required to make the unmarked hike to the Wave, and only 20 are given out daily. It’s almost easier to make the journey to southwest Australia to see the Wave’s down under counterpart, Wave Rock.
Moeraki Beach Boulders, New Zealand: The spherical stones that line New Zealand’s Moeraki Beach reach up to seven feet in diameter and have been compared to everything from the marbles of giants to colossal dinosaur eggs to half-submerged prehistoric turtles, ready to stand up and shake off the sand at any moment. They’re actually concretions, masses of compacted sediment formed below ground more than 50 million years ago. As the sand that surrounds them erodes, they seem to rise to the surface as if pushed up from the center of the earth. The stones are also found on Bowling Ball Beach in Mendocino, CA, as well as elsewhere in the U.S. and Canada and Russia.
