Western Australia is Australia's largest state in area, covering the western third of the mainland, and is bordered by South Australia and the Northern Territory. It is, after the Sakha Republic in Russia, the second largest subnational entity (statoid) in the world. The capital city, Perth, is the most isolated city of over 1 million people in the world, being closer to Jakarta, Indonesia (3,007 km/1,868 miles) than to Sydney (3,284 km/2,041 miles).

West Australians are often colloquially referred to as sandgropers because of the insect found on sand dunes around Perth.

Geography

The bulk of Western Australia consists of the extremely old Yilgarn craton and Pilbara craton which merged with the Deccan of India, Madagascar and the Karoo and Zimbabwe cratons of South Africa, in the Archean Eon to form Ur, one of the oldest Supercontinents on Earth (3,200-3,000 million years ago). Because the only mountain-building since then has been of the Stirling Range with the rifting from Antarctica, the land is extremely eroded and ancient, with no part of the State today above 1,245 metres (4,085 ft) AHD (at Mount Meharry in the Hamersley Range of the Pilbara region). Most parts of the State form a low plateau with an average elevation of about 400 metres (1,200 ft), very low relief, and no surface runoff. This descends relatively sharply to the coastal plains, in some cases forming a sharp escarpment (as with the Darling Range/Darling Scarp near Perth).

The extreme age of the landscape has meant that the soils are remarkably infertile and frequently laterised. Even soils derived from granitic bedrock contain an order of magnitude less available phosphorus and only half as much nitrogen as soils in comparable climates in other continents. Soils derived from extensive sandplains or ironstone are even less fertile, being even more devoid of soluble phosphate and also deficient in zinc, copper, molybdenum and sometimes potassium and calcium.

The infertility of most of the soils has required heavy inputs of chemical fertilisers, particularly superphosphate, insecticides and herbicides, which, with the ensuing damage to invertebrate and bacterial populations, and compaction of soils through heavy machinery and hoofed mammals has done great damage to the fragile soils. The massive clearing of the land has not only damaged habitats for native flora and fauna, making the South West region of the state that with the greatest percentage of flora and fauna rare, threatened or endangered in Australia, and one of the biodiversity "hot spots" in the world, it has also led to major problems with dryland salinity and the loss of fresh water.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Western Australia"

Buy Western Australia prints at Art.com