After our dolphin viewing at Monkey Mia in the morning, we hadn't left ourselves with much time to cram in some driving plus - we still had to see the Stromatolites at Hamelin Pool, just down the road from our previous campsite at The Station Stay. Because the road to Monkey Mia is a dead end, we literally had to turn around and trace our last 150kms driven back to the main highway. Rather than tracking on, we decided to setup camp at the Station Stay for another night.
The Stromatolites were quite interesting. To look at them, they just look like fluffy pieces of blob on rocks in the sand (clearly that's not geological terminology) but their importance is in understanding their significance. Up until 60 years ago, it was believed that Stromatolites were extinct. In the 1950's, a colony of them were found right in Shark Bay alive and well, bubbling away just as they had been doing for over 300 million years.
Stromatolites are an unassuming colony of cyano-bacteria which photosynthesis' the suns light into energy, giving off oxygen as waste. It is thought that Stromatolites are responsible for raising the Earth's atmospheric oxygen levels to above a crucial 20% therefore allowing multicellular life to evolve (us).
This is quarry used in the 1800s just up the road from Shell Beach. They sliced up the compacted shells to use them as bricks for building.
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