Skyline Scenic Drive - Wabaunsee County | Photo Scott Bean, Text Keith Miller, authors of Kansas Landscapes: A Photographic Tour of the Region's Geological History, licensed to Sierra Club Kansas Chapter
This photograph taken along the Skyline Scenic Drive in Wabaunsee County displays a typical terraced landscape of the Flint Hills. The 300 million-year-old early Permian rocks that form this landscape consist of limestones deposited in a shallow inland sea, alternating with colorful mudstones recording vegetated coastal environments. The more resistant limestones, many of which contain flint nodules, form the flat terraces, with the mudstones forming the slopes between. The repeated alternation of marine and terrestrial conditions was caused by rising and falling global sea levels driven by the advance and retreat of continental glaciers on lands then lying near the south pole.