This Week’s Theme: Rocks.
40,000 (or so) roundish columns of basalt rock form the Northern Ireland remains of a legendary causeway to Scotland. This particiular photo, by Cavin, was shot on the Northern Ireland side. In actuality, the whole area “was subject to intense volcanic activity, when highly fluid molten basalt intruded through chalk beds to form an extensive lava plateau. As the lava cooled, contraction occurred. Horizontal contraction fractured in a similar way to drying mud, with the cracks propagating down as the mass cooled, leaving pillarlike structures, which are also fractured horizontally into ‘biscuits’.” -source Wikipedia
While I respect and honor the scientific explanation of what happened here, it’s so much more fun to believe a giant built it. 🙂
We have a similar formation in America. It’s called the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, which had a staring role in the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind“, one of my all time favorite movies.
View more of Cavin’s causeway photos via his flickr album.
Inspiration
“At the sea shore you pick up a pebble, fashioned after a law of nature, in the exact form that best resists pressure, and worn as smooth as glass. It is so perfect that you take it as a keepsake. But could you know its history from the time when a rough fragment of rock fell from the overhanging cliff into the sea, to be taken possession of by the under currents, and dragged from one ocean to another, perhaps around the world, for a hundred years, until in reduced and perfect form it was cast upon the beach as you find it, you would have a fit illustration of what many principles, now in familiar use, have endured, thus tried, tortured and fashioned during the ages. ~ Joseph Neilson
Happy Coloring!
joyfully, Maureen
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