Banded rocks of Hosta Beach, North Uist, Outer Hebrides, Scotland.

[u/BaronVonBroccoli]

[u/evasandor]

NGL I thought these were people in striped swimsuits lying on the beach.

[u/themonovingian → u/evasandor]

Not my proudest fap!

[u/langhaar808 → u/themonovingian]

I mean you could definitely be kinda proud of that.

[u/SixersWin → u/themonovingian]

Nobody ever shares their proudest

[u/Cool_Coder709 → u/evasandor]

i thought these were frikin dead bodies in a warzone 😭

[u/MaximumNo7233 → u/Cool_Coder709]

Same! Still not my proudest fap though.

[u/ThirdAltAccounts → u/MaximumNo7233]

Far from my most shameful though

[u/ThinNeighborhood2276]

Beautiful natural patterns! Do you know what causes the banding in these rocks?

[u/PrePrePreMed → u/ThinNeighborhood2276]

Sediment layers rotated 90 degrees, I think.

[u/dread_deimos → u/PrePrePreMed]

Yeah, that looks like a few hundreds of thousands of years of sediment that once was a cliff.

[u/bbby_chaltinez → u/ThinNeighborhood2276]

more like a mafic intrusion aka sill(horizontal) or dyke(vertical). basaltic lava got pushed through and cooled down. if it was sedimentary, then metamorphic, i feel like the foliation would be more mixed. i hope someone else can tell me. if this was a dyke/sill, i feel like the host rock would be baked and metamorphosed. would like someone else’s opinion too.

[u/kraken665 → u/bbby_chaltinez]

Well, here's a rabbit hole I'm about to spend hours learning about. thanks!

[u/jpipersson → u/bbby_chaltinez]

Could be both sedimentary and igneous. Basalt usually formed on the surface if I remember correctly from my geology class 40 years ago. So it could be lava got deposited on top of another formation and then got covered up. I think intrusions usually have larger crystals, like granite. Then the whole formation could’ve been tilted so that it was vertical.

[u/CpnLouie]

What you've got here is a formation of sedimentation layers and/or igneous layering that, due to geological shifts, winds up laying down. Picture a landslide off the side of a mountain where the once-vertical rock face now lies horizontally on the ground.

You can see the opposite of this on some mountains, like the Himalayas, that were formed by tectonic plates crashing into each other that caused the flat seabed to fold upwards like a tent. So, what was once laying horizontally on the earth is now vertical or near-vertical.

[u/arthurno1 → u/CpnLouie]

Oh, c'mon! We all want to hear some Alien vehicle theory a la Erich von Däniken here!

I'm just kidding 😀. Thanks for the explanation.

[u/dferrit]

What I saw first was people wrapped in body bags for some reason.

[u/bbby_chaltinez]

yeah it could have flipped over, could be mafic sills intruding the prior layer and over time it rotated 90 degrees.

[u/--dany--]

Looks like artistic graffiti at first sight!

[u/BeardedGlass → u/--dany--]

Looks like forearm tattoos!

[u/Building_Everything]

Shit like this is why I should have continued studying geology instead of a practical career in construction

[u/TheBoisterousBoy]

Ah, the Final Shape.

[u/Foolfook]

Has anybody tried a barcode reader on those?

[u/TheTruthIsVague]

You would swear that’s it painted … look at absolute straight lines of each color … amazingly awesome!!

[u/Willing_Stomach_8121]

Looks like sleeping giants

[u/DniproBombers]

Reminds me of Queen's I Want to Break Free video.

[u/MintImperial2]

Did a Supertanker run across the rocks there?

[u/brucewaynewayne]

I thought these were dead minions

[u/Strylexio]

It seems that layers of rock are on the surface. I'm asking what it is specifically

[u/bbby_chaltinez → u/Strylexio]

it used to be way under ground millions of years ago. tectonic plates move the rocks up and down move them up and down. also erosion eats away from the top.