Carnarvon Gorge
Carnarvon Gorge is located in the Southern Brigalow Belt bioregion in Central Queensland (Australia), 593 km northwest of Brisbane.
[5] Within the lower ten kilometres of the Gorge, visitors can encounter a variety of cultural and natural values that, elsewhere in the region, would require considerable travel to experience; significant Indigenous cultural sites and rock art sites, narrow sandstone canyons, extensive sandstone cliff lines, basalt-capped tablelands and mountain ranges, and relict rainforest vegetation.
There is a ten kilometre (10 km) track leading into Carnarvon Gorge, with diversions into specific sites such as the Art Gallery, Big Bend, Wards Canyon, Cathedral Cave, the Amphitheatre and the Moss Garden.
Situated within the Central Queensland Sandstone Belt, and separating the Consuelo Tableland and the Great Dividing Range, Carnarvon Gorge's landscapes have largely been shaped by water erosion.
Over the last twenty seven million years Carnarvon Creek, which winds for over 30 kilometres (19 mi),[4] has carved down through six hundred metres of stone, exposing rocks from three significant phases of Queensland's geological history including two sedimentary basins, the Bowen and the Surat, and the Buckland Volcanic Province.
[6] The basalt layer is present on top of the high country either side of the Gorge where it protects the landscape from erosion and generates significantly different soils to those derived from the lower sedimentary rocks.
Boulders eroded from the basalt layer dominate the Gorge's waterways due to their ability to resist water erosion better than the sedimentary rocks they once overlaid.
The most visible rocks in the Gorge belong to the Surat Basin, which holds most of Queensland's gas and oil and significant amounts of groundwater.
The Precipice Sandstone is one of the primary intake beds for the Great Artesian Basin, giving the area where it lies exposed significance as a replenishment zone.
Carnarvon Gorge has a rich mammalian fauna including Australia's two monotremes, the platypus (Ornithorhyncus anatinus) and the echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus).
This situation is of concern to Park rangers as it allows opportunistic species, such as the laughing kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae) and the pied currawong (Strepera graculina), to develop population sizes that are abnormally large.
Communally breeding birds, such as the white-winged chough, the laughing kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae), and the apostlebird (Struthidea cinerea), are a feature of the ecosystems around the entrance to Carnarvon Gorge.
Peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) and wedge-tailed eagles patrol the cliffs further into the Gorge whilst, below, numerous parrots and honeyeaters forage amongst the eucalypt canopy.
Closer to ground level, visitors are likely to encounter the Australian raven (Corvus coronoides) and the pied currawong (Strepera graculina) anywhere they stop to eat.
The introduced cane toad is currently implicated in the local disappearance of the northern quoll, once thought extinct all over QLD, a small population was established not long ago after 30 years of not one sighting of this critter, was found on a spotting job(Dasyurus Hallucatus).
Large aggregations of common crow (Euploea core) butterflies can occur in Carnarvon's cool, moist side gorges when the animals gather to overwinter.
