Painted Badlands

Painted Badlands is an original illustration set in Patagonian Badlands, Argentina. It lies in mid-latitudes, where the climate is cold semi-arid steppe.

Soft rounded hills carry continuous horizontal colour bands, cut across by narrow V-shaped gullies. A flat gravel pediment spreads at their foot with sparse thorn cushions on it. The sky takes up most of the frame, and everything looks scoured rather than weathered.

Why is this land cut into bare ridges with no plant cover?

Badlands form where soft, poorly cemented sediment gets rain in short violent bursts and has almost no plant cover to hold it — so runoff cuts straight down instead of spreading. The bands are stacked ancient lake and floodplain deposits. Cushion-shaped thorn plants hugging the ground are a wind adaptation, and their scarcity is why the gullies are still sharp.

Terpano is a free daily geography puzzle. You study one original illustration, place a pin on a borderless terrain map, and see how close you were. There is no account and no sign-up; progress stays in your own browser. It plays in 11 languages.