Tunnel Creek National Park - Geography

Geography

The park is located in the Napier Range and covers an area of 91 hectares (220 acres). The range is composed of limestone and is the remains of a Devonian reef system formed around 350 million years ago.

The tunnel component of Tunnel Creek has a length of approximately 750 m (2,460 ft) that runs underground and it one of the oldest cave systems in Western Australia. The reef was first exposed around 250 million years ago and the first cave systems began to form, the present cave systems were created about 20 million years ago.

The cave reaches a maximum height of 12 m (39 ft) and has a maximum width of 15 m (49 ft). The creek was once known as "The Cave of the Bats" with at least five species of bat inhabiting the cavern. There are large pools of water on the floor of the cave in which freshwater crocodiles have been found. The pools indicate that the water table is only just below the present floor surface and water only flows through the area after heavy rainfall.

Read more about this topic:  Tunnel Creek National Park

Famous quotes containing the word geography:

    Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    The California fever is not likely to take us off.... There is neither romance nor glory in digging for gold after the manner of the pictures in the geography of diamond washing in Brazil.
    Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)