These things popped up in my faecesbook feed/swilltrough and I was 100% convinced they were AI generated, because despite a lifetime of interest in matters geological I’d never seen or heard of them before, and rock pretty much never weathers quite like this.
Generally taller-than-wide is a formula for a brief existence, and when it happens it tends to be either coastal erosion dissecting uniform sedimentary rocks (e.g. Man of Hoy), or badland/canyonland (e.g. the wonderfully-named ‘hoodoos’ which are way smaller), but not landscapes like this one… But no - in the Ural mountains stand the Manpupuner pillars, up to 42m in height and looking like a Marvel-inspired CGI -
Likely hardened beyond the usual by metamorphic processes in pipe-like structures within what were already bloody hard rocks, and then differentially weathered out over millions of years.
The etymology sounds like it’s quite messy. Did we call the Milky Way that before we knew it was a whole bunch of individual stars ? Did we call it a galaxy before we knew what it was ? The Andromeda galaxy is a naked-eye object but it seerms we called it a nebula until we worked out that it was actually a galaxy and not a smaller thing inside our galaxy.
