LIVE , THRIVE , TRAVEL & EXPLORE
SEVEN COLORED EARTH
This spectacular view of Earth is in Mauritius where people can witness the beauty of colorful piece of land.
The Seven Colored Earth(s) (Terres des Sept Couleurs in french) are a geological formation and prominent tourist attraction found in the Chamarel plain, in the Black River District of south-western Mauritius.
It is a relatively small area of sand dunes comprising sand of seven distinct colors (approximately red, brown, violet, green, blue, purple and yellow).
The main feature of the place is that since these differently colored sands spontaneously settle in different layers, dunes acquire a surrealistic, striped coloring. This phenomenon can also be observed, on a smaller scale, if one takes a handful of sands of different colors and mixes them together, as they'll eventually separate into a layered spectrum.
Another interesting feature of Chamarel's Coloured Earths is that the dunes seemingly never erode, in spite of Mauritius' torrential, tropical rains.
The sands have formed from the decomposition of volcanic rock (basalt) gullies into clay, further transformed into ferralitic soil by total hydrolysis; the two main elements of the resulting soil, iron and aluminium, are responsible for red/anthracite and blue/purplish colours respectively. The different shades of color are believed to be a consequence of the molten volcanic rock cooling down at different external temperatures, but the causes of their consistent spontaneous separation are yet to be fully clarified.