Too many geology. Hello, young people. Columnar basalt hiking today near Othello, Washington. Look at these columns. They're perfect and 50 feet high. These columns are found in Iraq called basalt, which is a lava flow rock. We have them all over Eastern Washington, but we can also find columns like this at Devil's Tower in Wyoming and Giant's Causeway in Ireland. We've even found columnar basalt on Mars. Here in Eastern Washington, the Ice Age floods came barreling through this country thousands of years ago, ripping up a lot of bedrock and exposing these columns. To figure out why the columns form, how about we actually climb to the top of these columns and walk around up there to see if we can't figure things out? Come on, let's get up there. Each of these is a column. We're up on top of them now. These cracks are 50 feet deep and these cracks with this beautiful pattern are found all through nature. You go to a drying mud puddle after a thunderstorm and you see cracks like this. You go to the Arctic and you see permafrost with cracks in these shapes. These lavas cooled 10.5 million years ago when the lava came in at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and probably cooled over the course of a century - 100 years of cooling. These cracks got established back then as the lava was cooling, contracting surfaces shrinking, and the net result columnar basalt near Othello, Washington. It's all out here - see Cooley's Rocks and canyons - scenery right here for you and me. Two-minute geology.
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