Sandstone in the context of Topography

Sediment is a solid material made of loose particles that is transported to a new location where it is deposited. It occurs naturally and, through the processes of weathering and erosion, is broken down and subsequently transported by the action of wind, water, or ice or by the force of gravity acting on the particles. For example, sand and silt can be carried in suspension in river water and on reaching the sea bed deposited by sedimentation; if buried, they may eventually become sandstone and siltstone (sedimentary rocks) through lithification.

Sediments are most often transported by water (fluvial processes), but also wind (aeolian processes) and glaciers. Beach sands and river channel deposits are examples of fluvial transport and deposition, though sediment also often settles out of slow-moving or standing water in lakes and oceans. Desert sand dunes and loess are examples of aeolian transport and deposition. Glacial moraine deposits and till are ice-transported sediments.

The Belogradchik Rocks (Bulgarian: Белоградчишки скали, Belogradchishki skali) are a group of strangely shaped sandstone and conglomerate rock formations located on the western slopes of the Balkan Mountains (Stara Planina) near the town of Belogradchik in northwest Bulgaria. The rocks vary in color from primarily red to yellow; some of the rocks reach up to 200 m in height. Many rocks have fantastic shapes and are associated with interesting legends. They are often named after people or objects they are thought to resemble. The Belogradchik Rocks have been declared a Natural Landmark by the Bulgarian government and are a major tourist attraction in the region. They are the only habitat of the critically endangered Bulgarian endemic plant Hieracium belogradcense.

In geography and geology, a cliff or rock face is an area of rock which has a general angle defined by the vertical, or nearly vertical. Cliffs are formed by the processes of weathering and erosion, with the effect of gravity. Cliffs are common on coasts, in mountainous areas, escarpments and along rivers. Cliffs are usually composed of rock that is resistant to weathering and erosion. The sedimentary rocks that are most likely to form cliffs include sandstone, limestone, chalk, and dolomite. Igneous rocks such as granite and basalt also often form cliffs.

An escarpment (or scarp) is a type of cliff formed by the movement of a geologic fault, a landslide, or sometimes by rock slides or falling rocks which change the differential erosion of the rock layers.

Petra (Arabic: ٱلْبَتْراء‎, romanized: Al-Batrāʾ; Ancient Greek: Πέτρα, lit. 'Rock'), originally known to its inhabitants as Raqmu (Nabataean Aramaic: 𐢛𐢚𐢒‎ or 𐢛𐢚𐢓𐢈‎, *Raqēmō), is an ancient city and archaeological site in southern Jordan. Famous for its rock-cut architecture and water conduit systems, Petra is also called the "Rose City" because of the colour of the sandstone from which it is carved. The city is one of the New 7 Wonders of the World and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The area around Petra has been inhabited from as early as 7000 BC, and was settled by the Nabataeans, a nomadic Arab people, in the 4th century BC. Petra would later become the capital city of the Nabataean Kingdom in the second century BC. The Nabataeans invested in Petra's proximity to the incense trade routes by establishing it as a major regional trading hub, which gained them considerable revenue. Unlike their enemies, the Nabataeans were accustomed to living in the barren deserts and thus were able to defend their kingdom. They were particularly skillful in agriculture, stone carving, and rainwater harvesting.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien (lit. "Vienna Museum of Art History", often referred to as the "Museum of Fine Arts, Vienna") is an art museum in Vienna, Austria. Housed in its festive palatial building on the Vienna Ring Road, it is crowned with an octagonal dome. The term Kunsthistorisches Museum applies to both the institution and the main building. It is the largest art museum in the country.

Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary opened the facility around 1891 at the same time as the Natural History Museum, Vienna which has a similar design and is directly across Maria-Theresien-Platz. The two buildings were constructed between 1871 and 1891 according to plans by Gottfried Semper and Baron Karl von Hasenauer. The emperor commissioned the two Ringstraße museums to create a suitable home for the Habsburgs' formidable art collection and to make it accessible to the general public. The buildings are rectangular, with symmetrical Renaissance Revival façades of sandstone lined with large arched windows on the main levels and topped with octagonal domes 60 metres (200 ft) high. The interiors of the museums are lavishly decorated with marble, stucco ornamentation, gold-leaf, and murals. The grand stairway features paintings by Gustav Klimt, Ernst Klimt, Franz Matsch, Hans Makart and Mihály Munkácsy.

The Early Dynastic Period, also known as Archaic Period or the Thinite Period (from Thinis, the hometown of its rulers), is the era of ancient Egypt that immediately follows the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in c. 3150 BC. It is generally taken to include the First Dynasty and the Second Dynasty, lasting from the end of the archaeological culture of Naqada III until c. 2686 BC, or the beginning of the Old Kingdom. With the First Dynasty, the Egyptian capital moved from Thinis to Memphis, with the unified land being ruled by an Egyptian god-king. In the south, Abydos remained the major centre of ancient Egyptian religion; the hallmarks of ancient Egyptian civilization, such as Egyptian art, Egyptian architecture, and many aspects of Egyptian religion, took shape during the Early Dynastic Period.

Before the unification of Egypt, the land was settled with autonomous villages. With the early dynasties, and for much of Egypt's history thereafter, the country came to be known as "The Two Lands" (referencing Upper and Lower Egypt). The pharaohs established a national administration and appointed royal governors, and buildings of the central government were typically open-air temples constructed of wood or sandstone. The earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs appear just before this period, though little is known of the spoken language that they represent.

Trier (/trɪər/ TREER, German: [tʁiːɐ̯] ; Luxembourgish: Tréier [ˈtʀɜɪ̯ɐ] ), formerly and traditionally known in English as Trèves (/trɛv/ TREV, French: [tʁɛv] ) and Triers (see also names in other languages), is a city on the banks of the Moselle in Germany. It lies in a valley between low vine-covered hills of red sandstone in the west of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, near the border with Luxembourg and within the important Moselle wine region.

Founded by the Romans in the late 1st century BC as Augusta Treverorum ("The City of Augustus among the Treveri"), Trier is considered Germany's oldest city. It is also the oldest seat of a bishop north of the Alps. Trier was one of the four capitals of the Roman Empire during the Tetrarchy period in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries. In the Middle Ages, the archbishop-elector of Trier was an important prince of the Church who controlled land from the French border to the Rhine. The archbishop-elector of Trier also had great significance as one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire. Because of its significance during the Roman and Holy Roman empires, several monuments and cathedrals within Trier are listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

A pyramidion (plural: pyramidia) is the capstone of an Egyptian pyramid or the upper section of an obelisk. Speakers of the Ancient Egyptian language referred to pyramidia as benbenet and associated the pyramid as a whole with the sacred benben stone.

Pyramidia were usually made of limestone, sandstone, basalt or granite, and were sometimes covered with plates of copper, gold or electrum. From the Middle Kingdom onward, they were often "inscribed with royal titles and religious symbols".

• A ″ natural material a substance that comes from plants, animals, or the earth, and has not been made by humans.. Minerals and the metals that can be extracted from them (without further modification) are also considered to belong into this category. Natural materials are used as building materials and clothing. Types include:

• Biotic materials
  • Wood (rattan, bamboo, bark, etc.)
• Plant fiber (coir, ramie, sisal, cotton, flax, hemp, jute, kapok, kenaf, moss, linen, abacá, etc.)
• Animal fiber (wool, silk, alpaca, camel, angora, cashmere, mohair, etc.)
• Inorganic material
  • Stone (flint, granite, limestone, obsidian, sandstone, sand, gems, glass, etc.)
  • Native metal (copper, iron, gold, silver, etc.)
  • Composites (clay, plasticine, etc.)
• Other natural materials.
  • Soil

A dune is a landform composed of wind- or water-driven sand. It typically takes the form of a mound, ridge, or hill. An area with dunes is called a dune system or a dune complex. A large dune complex is called a dune field, while broad, flat regions covered with wind-swept sand or dunes, with little or no vegetation, are called ergs or sand seas. Dunes occur in different shapes and sizes, but most kinds of dunes are longer on the stoss (upflow) side, where the sand is pushed up the dune, and have a shorter slip face in the lee side. The valley or trough between dunes is called a dune slack.

Dunes are most common in desert environments, where the lack of moisture hinders the growth of vegetation that would otherwise interfere with the development of dunes. However, sand deposits are not restricted to deserts, and dunes are also found along sea shores, along streams in semiarid climates, in areas of glacial outwash, and in other areas where poorly cemented sandstone bedrock disintegrates to produce an ample supply of loose sand. Subaqueous dunes can form from the action of water flow (fluvial processes) on sand or gravel beds of rivers, estuaries, and the sea-bed.

Common descent is a concept in evolutionary biology applicable when one species is the ancestor of two or more species later in time. According to modern evolutionary biology, all living beings could be descendants of a unique ancestor commonly referred to as the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all life on Earth.

Common descent is an effect of speciation, in which multiple species derive from a single ancestral population. The more recent the ancestral population two species have in common, the more closely they are related. The most recent common ancestor of all currently living organisms is the last universal ancestor, which lived about 3.9 billion years ago. The two earliest pieces of evidence for life on Earth are graphite found to be biogenic in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks discovered in western Greenland and microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia. All currently living organisms on Earth share a common genetic heritage, though the suggestion of substantial horizontal gene transfer during early evolution has led to questions about the monophyly (single ancestry) of life. 6,331 groups of genes common to all living animals have been identified; these may have arisen from a single common ancestor that lived 650 million years ago in the Precambrian.

Gilf Kebir (جلف كبير) (var. Gilf al-Kebir, Jilf al Kabir, Gilf Kebir Plateau) is a plateau in the New Valley Governorate of the remote southwest corner of Egypt, and southeast Libya. Its name translates as "the Great Barrier". This 7,770 km (3,000 sq mi) sandstone plateau, roughly the size of Puerto Rico, rises 300 m (980 ft) from the Libyan Desert floor. It is the true heart of the Gilf Kebir National Park.

The name Gilf Kebir was given to the plateau by Prince Kamal el Dine Hussein in 1925, as it had no local name. It is known for its rugged beauty, remoteness, geological interest, and the dramatic cliff paintings-pictographs and rock carvings-petroglyphs which depict an earlier era of abundant animal life and human habitation.

The Dresser Formation is a Paleoarchean geologic formation that outcrops as a generally circular ring of hills in the North Pole Dome area of the East Pilbara Terrane of the Pilbara Craton of Western Australia. This formation is one of many formations that comprise the Warrawoona Group, which is the lowermost of four groups that comprise the Pilbara Supergroup. The Dresser Formation is part of the Panorama greenstone belt that surrounds and outcrops around the intrusive North Pole Monzogranite. Dresser Formation consists of metamorphosed, blue, black, and white bedded chert; pillow basalt; carbonate rocks; minor felsic volcaniclastic sandstone and conglomerate; hydrothermal barite; evaporites; and stromatolites. The lowermost of three stratigraphic units that comprise the Dresser Formation contains some of the Earth's earliest commonly accepted evidence of life such as morphologically diverse stromatolites, microbially induced sedimentary structures, putative organic microfossils, and biologically fractionated carbon and sulfur isotopic data.

In sedimentology, compaction is the process by which a sediment progressively loses its porosity due to the effects of pressure from loading. This forms part of the process of lithification. When a layer of sediment is originally deposited, it contains an open framework of particles with the pore space being usually filled with water. As more sediment is deposited above the layer, the effect of the increased loading is to increase the particle-to-particle stresses resulting in porosity reduction primarily through a more efficient packing of the particles and to a lesser extent through elastic compression and pressure solution. The initial porosity of a sediment depends on its lithology. Mudstones start with porosities of >60%, sandstones typically ~40% and carbonates sometimes as high as 70%. Results from hydrocarbon exploration wells show clear porosity reduction trends with depth. Compaction trend estimation and decompaction process are useful for analyzing numerical basin evolution (e.g., subsidence) and evaluating hydrocarbon reservoirs and geological storages.

In sediments compacted under self-weight, especially in sedimentary basins, the porosity profiles often show an exponential decrease, called Athy's law as first shown by Athy in 1930. A mathematical analytical solution was obtained by Fowler and Yang to show the theoretical basis for Athy's law. This process can be easily observed in experiments and used as a good approximation to many real data.

Sarsen stones are silicified sandstone blocks found extensively across southern England on the Salisbury Plain and the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire; in Kent; and in smaller quantities in Berkshire, Essex, Oxfordshire, Dorset, and Hampshire.