Mysterious Iceland Pillars Not Formed by Fighting Trolls
Source: news.discovery.com
You can’t blame those pesky angry trolls -- at least not this time, according to an article in Earth Magazine.
Mysterious basalt pillars in Iceland had long been ascribed to a fight between two trolls who had thrown lumps of rock at one another. But scientists have now debunked this local lore, saying the pillars were in fact formed by an unusual geological process.
The pillars, numbering about 40 in all and measuring up to about 8.2 feet tall and 5 feet wide, are dispersed around Skaelingar Valley, where a tributary flows into the Skafta River near Iceland’s southern coast. It turns out these formations were not the projectiles thrown by trolls, but were likely the result of unusual lava-water interactions on land.
Looking at the odd collection of pillars, one can imagine how the angry troll explanation may have taken root.
"It’s almost an otherworldly experience to see these things for the first time because they’re just not very common features," Tracy Gregg, a volcanologist at the University at Buffalo, told Earth Magazine.
Gregg, along with graduate student Kenneth Christle, explained that the hollow pillars likely formed around vertical columns of steam and superheated water venting through lava as it flowed over ground.
Gregg said the pillars resemble so-called lava trees in Hawaii, which are hollow basalt cylinders that formed as lava flowed through a forest and cooled when coming in contact with tree trunks. The trunks were burned up in the process, leaving the cylinders behind. Gregg explained to the magazine that they know this didn’t happen in the Iceland location since there were no trees there.
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Read the full article at: news.discovery.com
