Low Tide in a Long Spring Evening
Our Giant’s Causeway visit was during a long spring evening, low tide. The long strands of a kelp forest curling.
Click photograph for a larger view. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page.
Articulated Building Blocks
Look closer at the basalt column featured in yesterday’s post.
Click photograph for a larger view. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page.
Articulated Building Blocks — HAPPY FATHER’S DAY
“List of places with columnar jointed volcanics” is a Wikipedia page, over a hundred sites across the globe and high resolution images of Mars, these columns of Giant’s Causeway are no less marvelous for being the most famous of a phenomenon well documented.
A pile of articulated blocks, ready for assembly, next to orderly placed columns forming a pavement into the sea. Across the way, on the Isle of Mull, Scotland, a matching pavement. “Jointed” means one surface of each block is convex, the other concave, two blocks fit together.
Click photograph for a larger view. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page.
…with the stars of the show.
Click photograph for a larger view. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page.
..and the first columns.
Click photograph for a larger view. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page.
Large Rocks and Grass
More stunning views from the Causeway Walk on the way to the main attraction. We did not explore enough to discover the sand reported to exist along the water margin.
Click photograph for a larger view. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page.
Spheroidal weathering of Basalt
Layers of red rock, lit here by sunset on Giant’s Causeway, along the cliff trail, seen here from below, are called laterite from the Latin for brick (later). Here it is formed from iron rich basalt laid down well before the upper layers of the magma plateau. It takes eons to weather and oxidize the iron of basalt, transforming it to the brick red of laterite, yet the rocks above it are still dark. The process happens in warmer climates with alternating cycles of rain and drought, for Ireland this was when the land was much farther south than today. Giant’s Causeway, County Antrim, Northern Ireland.
Here it is formed from iron rich basalt laid down well before the upper layers of the magma plateau. It takes eons to weather and oxidize the iron of basalt, transforming it to the brick red of laterite, yet the rocks above it are still dark. The process happens in warmer climates with alternating cycles of rain and drought, for Ireland this was when the land was much farther south than today.
Click photograph for a larger view. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page.
Lava dikes rise from the water below. Here is a wider view with the “causeway” elements with human figures in foreground.
2,400 miles distant
Next stop Iceland, about 705 miles over the water, in this view north from Giant’s Causeway walk.
Click photograph for a larger view. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page.
Can you see the footpath? The human figures? They provide a sense of scale. I love that patch to yellowed grass.
Spheroidal weathering of Basalt
In preparation for our Ireland tour I woke before work to research each location, filling a leather bound notebook with facts and observations. Faced with the Giant’s Causeway I was woefully unprepared to comprehend the sights.
Walking down the Causeway path, the cliffs rise on the right, at the foot are these strange deposits. The Causeway is part of an enormous lava plateau formed during eruptions 50-60 million years ago. This lava was at bottom, eventually exposed to weather. As eons passed, the basalt reacted chemically with rainwater, the outer rock flaking off like layers of an onion to reveal these strange rounded forms.
Click photograph for a larger view. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page.
Being here is like finding the abandoned workshop of a giant. The place lives up to the name.
A Bactrian Camel (?)
The entire northern Antrim coast is the remnant of an lava flow hundreds of feet deep, the depth corresponds to cliff height today. It made a great location for a defensive fort, or dun, featured in an earlier post. I say today because on a time scale of 50 million years the late Bronze age, 3000 years ago, was yesterday.
Here is another view from the Giant’s Causeway walk, wonders presented at every step. This lava dike, now surrounded by water, formed when flowing lava entered a crack though a layer of basalt from an earlier eruption. The lava cooled, over eons the surrounding material eroded, leaving a wall of rock. This formation has an irregular surface that resembles a two humped camel from some angles.
Click photograph for a larger view. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page.
Michael Stephen Wills Photography 