sandstone: Quick Facts

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Photos

Curved sandstone formations with red, orange, and white stripes create a wave-like pattern under a clear blue sky in Arizona.

Sandstone buttes and pinnacles, Monument Valley, Arizona

Zion National Park

Red sandstone rock formations with layered textures stretch across the landscape in Valley of Fire State Park, Overton, Nevada, under a partly cloudy sky.

Cutaway diagram of a Grand Canyon wall showing layered sedimentary rocks-limestone, shale, sandstone, and composite rocks-with labels indicating Paleozoic rocks (about 252-541 million years old) above older Precambrian rocks, which include Proterozoic (541 million to 2.5 billion years old) and Archean (over 2.5 billion years old) layers. The Colorado River is shown at the base.

A chart categorizes common textural terms for rocks by grain size in millimeters, dividing them into igneous and metamorphic, sedimentary, and pyroclastic types, with terms like phaneritic, sand, silt, breccia, and ash shown in relation to size.

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Topics

quartzite arkose greensand flagstone sublitharenite red bed wacke black sand lithic arenite arenite micrite grit loess clay shale conglomerate breccia tillite siltstone permeability

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sedimentary rock: Sandstones

Key People

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Nikolaus Gerhaert von Leyden

Dutch sculptor