Unworldly Landscapes

The icefields of Patagonia seem almost unreal from above, and I imagine on the ground too: so vastly different from the habitats we are familiar with that they may as well be a world apart, a landscape from a more distant part of the cosmos. (Or, perhaps, they were indeed sculpted by a Slartibartfast from an extraterrestrial, more advanced civilisation.)

So do, come to think of it, Arizona's huge and ochre-hued Painted Desert and surrounding mesas. These preserve the remains of an earlier age of life---one of dinosaurs---very much alien to us. But then this was the Earth millions of years ago, not some distant planet. Likewise, during Ice Ages in times long before humankind flourished, large parts of our planet would have borne more resemblance to the icefields of Patagonia than to the grasslands and forests we are familiar with today.
So these landscapes, so relatively rare on the Earth today and thus unfamiliar and "unworldly" to us, belong to the Earth no less than our dear old meadows and woods and tropical rainforests. They are only strange and distant to us parochial humans, in space and, much more, in time. The "world" encompassed in the adjective is a very much anthrocentric one, specific and limited in time and place.