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How big is Uluru?

3.6 kilometers!

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Uluru

Uluru is a huge sandstone rock that rises from the flat desert of central Australia. It is about 3.6 kilometers (2.2 miles) long and stands 348 meters (1,142 feet) above the plain around it. It is sacred to the Anangu, the Aboriginal people who are its traditional owners, and it was formerly known as Ayers Rock.

Size

NASA and the EBSCO reference encyclopedia both give Uluru's length as about 3.6 kilometers, and EBSCO gives its width as 1.9 kilometers (1.2 miles). A walk all the way around its base covers 9.4 kilometers (5.8 miles). Parks Australia, which runs the national park together with the Anangu, gives its height as 348 meters above the surrounding plain.

Geoscience Australia, the national geology agency, gives slightly different figures: a height of 345 meters and an area of 3.3 square kilometers (820 acres). What shows above the ground is only a small part of the rock. Uluru is the tip of a much larger mass of rock that may reach as far as 6 kilometers underground.

Size comparisons

  • Uluru covers almost the same area as Central Park in New York City, which covers 843 acres (3.4 square kilometers). It is about nine-tenths as long as the park.
  • Uluru is 18 meters taller than the Eiffel Tower, which is 330 meters (1,083 feet) tall.
  • Angel Falls, the tallest waterfall, drops 979 meters, about 2.8 times Uluru's height.
  • About 33 American football fields, end zones included, laid end to end would stretch along its length.

How Uluru formed

Uluru is made of arkose, a coarse-grained sandstone rich in the mineral feldspar. Its sand was worn off a range of granite mountains about 550 million years ago and piled up in huge fans at their foot. About 500 million years ago a shallow sea covered the area, and the weight of new layers on the seabed turned the sand into rock.

Between about 400 and 300 million years ago, movements of the Earth's crust folded the rocks and tipped Uluru's layers nearly 90 degrees, so they now stand almost on end. The softer rocks around it then wore away, leaving Uluru standing above the plain. Its red color is rust, from iron in the rock that reacts with water and oxygen at the surface. Inside its caves, the rock keeps its original gray.

The Anangu and the national park

For the Anangu, Uluru is inseparable from Tjukurpa, their traditional law, and the actions of creation ancestors can still be seen around the rock. In 1873 the explorer William Gosse became the first non-Aboriginal person to see it. He named it Ayers Rock after Sir Henry Ayers, the Chief Secretary of South Australia.

On October 26, 1985, the Governor-General of Australia handed the title deeds of the national park back to the Anangu. They leased the land to the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service, now Parks Australia, for 99 years, and the park is now run jointly by the Anangu and Parks Australia. Climbing Uluru was not generally allowed under Tjukurpa, and the climb closed for good on October 26, 2019. The park has been on UNESCO's World Heritage List since 1987 for its natural values, and since 1994 as a cultural landscape.

Sources

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