Dr Kirstin (Kirsten) Lemon
speaker
98 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 10 Jul
Dr Kirstin (Kirsten) Lemon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So as it slowed, as it cooled, it contracted.
And as it contracted, stress is built up.
And the easiest way to relieve those stresses is for that lava to crack.
And it always cracks at an angle of 120 degrees.
That's when you get the hexagons forming.
It's the easiest way in nature for stress to be relieved.
It's for cracks to form at 120 degrees.
The cracks generally form perpendicular to the cooling surface.
And the cooling surface is the top of that pool of lava.
So if you imagine that's the top and the right angle of that would be going downwards.
So all of our cracks go downwards.
So that's why they are vertical.
I've been a little bit disingenuous in calling them all hexagons because nature, as we all know, is not always black and white.
There will be little pockets where it's not quite the same, it's maybe a bit hotter, maybe a bit cooler, maybe the chemical composition is a bit different.
So actually whilst most of our columns are six-sided, we have got four-sided, we've got five-sided, we have got seven-sided and there's even a couple of eight-sided.
So the key thing here is that these are all volcanic rocks.
So whilst we were volcanically active here in Northern Ireland 56 million years ago, Indonesia at the current day is still volcanically active.
They still have lava being produced and that's why you get features that are similar to this in many places around the world.
Either they've had volcanic activity in their geological past or they have volcanic activity right now and that's what's happening in Indonesia.
So different plate tectonic settings produces different types of volcanoes.
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