Why is Hạ Long Bay full of islands?
Stone Forest at Sea
Why is Hạ Long Bay full of islands?
Hạ Long Bay looks like someone dropped a thousand green mountains into the sea and walked away. Limestone towers shoot straight up from turquoise water — some as tall as skyscrapers, some small enough to paddle around in five minutes. Why are they here, clustered together like a stone forest that forgot to stay on land?
Four hundred million years ago, this whole area was the bottom of a warm, shallow sea. Tiny sea creatures — corals, shellfish, microscopic plankton — lived, died, and sank. Their shells piled up, layer after layer, year after year, century after century. Eventually that pile of shells became limestone rock, hundreds of meters thick.
