Buckley's Breakaway is situated in the midst of a vast granitic landscape that occupies most of the southwest corner of the Australian Continent.
This geilogical area is known as the Yilgarn Craton and dates back 2700 million years.
Much of the granite is hidden by a veneer of sandy soils, but across the gently undulating landscape of the Wheatbelt there are many hundreds of granite rock outcrops.
It has been shaped by the erosional forces of water.
Explore the Nature Reserve and discover how nature has crafted some of the Wheatbelt's most iconic landscapes.
The Wheatbelt is a vast, arid landscape of farmlands and woodlands.
But what lies beneath the surface, below its undulating hills and broad plains?
Here at Buckley's Breakaway is a rare opportunity to see this mostly hidden world and to discover how the landscape formed.
Very slow tranformation of the wheatbelt landscape
About 30 million years ago the wheatbelt landscape had granite outcrops covered the hilltops, slopes and valleys.
The climate was humid and tropical with two very different wet and dry seasons.
During each wet season, water leached out the granite's soluble elements like sodium, calcium and magnesium.
Whilist the water table fell during the dry season, these elements were concentrated in the soil and washed away during the next rains.
This slowly corroded the granite, dramatially changing its appearance.
Minerals such as mica and hard, pink felspar were altered to form the soft, white kaolinite clay that forms much of the breakaway today.
Quartz, however, which is very resistant to weathering remained embedded within the kaolinite.
On the surface, a residue of insoluble iron minerals accumulated to form the reddish crust of rock and gravel known as laterite that today hides the weathered granite below.
How the breakaways were created
Surface run-off has recently cut down through the laterite layer to expose the deeply weathered granite underneath.
Quartz grains from the kaolinite layer have been washed out and accumulated as patches of course sand.
The laterite is also being eroded and is slowly filling in parts of the breakaway with red gravel.
Kaolinite Definition -
Kaolinite is the most common clay mineral, and entire clay deposits can be composed of this mineral.
Rocks that are rich in kaolinite are known as kaolin or china clay.
There are many commercial Kaolinite mines where this mineral is mined in large volumes for its various industrial uses.
Kaolinite is named after the Kao-ling, a mountain in Jiangxi Province in China where this mineral was well-known from early times.
Laterite Definition -
Laterite is both a soil and a rock type rich in iron and aluminium and is commonly considered to have formed in hot and wet tropical areas. Nearly all laterites are of rusty-red coloration, because of high iron oxide content. They develop by intensive and prolonged weathering of the underlying parent rock. Tropical weathering (laterization) is a prolonged process of chemical weathering which produces a wide variety in the thickness, grade, chemistry and ore mineralogy of the resulting soils. The majority of the land area containing laterites is between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
Follow the trail where possible. Once you have located the cache head up the other end of the breakaway as it is well worth the extra few minutes.
Congratulations FTF to I C Nothing Kapelula Meme28 on there road trip down here.