Something Happened + RP

I'm no geologist, but this sandstone doesn't seem entirely normal. My understanding from talking to other geologists is that plain old sand, mostly colorless, piles up in dunes, is buried under additional sediments, and then is eventually lithified (turned to stone). After lithification, various oxides seep through the rock and just small amounts remain behind to add color to what is still mostly colorless grains of sand.

What I think is unusual about this sandstone is how the color is so confined to specific layers in the rock. It's almost as if the color was laid down with the sand layers when they were deposited so that each layer had its own color. I'm no hydrologist either, but this laminar flow of oxide-bearing water would seem somewhat unusual in rock that looks pretty much the same top to bottom, so that's why I wonder if the sand was maybe colored before it lithified.

The only scenario I can imagine is that maybe these now horizontal stripes were once vertical stripes. Oxide-rich water was simply pulled downward by gravity to produce vertical lines of color, and these vertical colors were eventually shifted horizontally through some layer-shifting process. Still, the natural capillarity of sandstone would seem like it would cause these lines of colors to be much more spread out as they penetrated to deeper layers. Although, under significant pressure of the additional layers above, perhaps the expected capillarity doesn't exist.

Regardless, it's some seems somewhat unusual and causes me to wonder how it got this way. Part of me likes to believe that it might simply be magic, but if someone knows what's going on here, I'd like knowing more about it.

Simple though the comp may be, this turned out to be a surprisingly difficult image to finish, and even now I'm not sure that I have the balance of brightness, contrast, texture, color, and saturation right. I'm somewhat frustrated that the Internet version is lighter than the actual print. I added a Multiply layer at 10% opacity to darken down the PS version for this jpeg. If this looks a little dark, that's possibly why, but, at least on my monitor, it matches the lighting in the print pretty well.

Your thoughts and recommendations would, as always, be most appreciated.

5D2, 28-200@92mm, ISO 100, f/16, 1/8 sec, 7 exposures blended with Helicon Focus.

(Repost below is hopefully improved.)