The strange landscape of Red Rock Coulee, Canada, that looks like it's from another planet

In several countries around the world, it is possible to find landscapes that seem strange to us and that have their origins in very remote ages of the Earth.

Canada's matryoshka island: an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island
Anyox: an abandoned military cemetery in a remote ghost town of Canada

One such landscape is 26 kilometers south of Seven Persons, Alberta, Canada. It is an area of badlands that from above it presents a curious appearance because it is full of irrigation circles. Such a landscape is curious to see, but ultimately, it is a testament to humankind's ability to shape the earth.

But the most curious thing about this place, called Red Rock Coulee, is that it has many rounded rock formations covering its desolate landscape. It's as if we were looking at the remains of a long-gone ancient civilization, whose shape is difficult to understand. Why are they like that and what are those rocks doing there?

The origin of Red Rock Coulee is in the Late Cretaceous and in the Maastrichtian geological age, between 75 and 72 million years before the present day. Although Red Rock Coulee is currently more than 1,000 kilometers east of the Pacific Ocean coast, at that geological age this site was under the waters of the Bearpaw Sea, in the so-called Western Interior Seaway that separated two large land masses: Laramidia, in the west, and Appalachia, in the east, connecting the Gulf of Mexico with the Arctic Ocean. Red Rock Coulee is part of the Bearpaw Formation, which extends from the northern United States to southern Canada. It is an area where there are abundant marine fossils.

The rounded rocks at this site are concretions, created by mineral cement that built up around biological remains. That cement, made of calcite and iron ore, eventually became hard enough to resist erosion much better than the surrounding soils (it's still a place dominated by considerable wind today). Erosion did the rest. If you want to know more, a few days ago Exploring with Wade published an interesting video touring this place:

You can see a small sample of the fascinating landscapes featured in this interesting video here: