Roter Sandstein

Discover the fascinating world of red sandstones! Red sandstones, a truly unique chapter of our Earth, tell a story of weathering and formations found on every continent. This book takes you on a journey to the southwest of Germany and the northeast of France, where at the edge of a former mountain range, the transition from coarse block debris to coarse sandstone and further basinward to finer sandstone and silt is visible. Learn how temporarily water-bearing rivers transported mountain debris into inland sinks and towards the sea, how sandstorms spread fine sand and dust over large areas, and how winds piled sand into dunes and plains. In this process, rock fragments were chipped off from cliffs, rounded as grains, sorted, and deposited in various ways. The diversity of the formation of these sandstones is reflected in the layers and formations. The red color gives them a common, distinctive feature. Each occurrence of red sandstones is unique with its own local characteristics. These fascinating rocks are mostly hidden, so when we hike in the low mountain ranges, we only see topsoil over the cover layers. These layers mostly consist of the weathering product of the red sandstones, and they too deserve closer examination. The sand and dust that make up the red sandstones originated from other rocks weathered into red earth and were deposited partly as formations of similar sandstones and partly as sandstone layers with varying properties. As the Earth's surface sank to greater depths, several hundred to over a thousand meters of sandstone accumulated during geological epochs. With changing mountain-building processes, these sandstones were raised again and exposed to weathering at the surface. Here we see them in various forms.