Tag: Lava

  • Porto do Cachorro

    Pico, The Azores (Açores), Portugal (March 2001) Porto do Cachorro meets the sea on Pico’s northwestern coast (map). It is an old, traditional town with narrow streets along a rugged coastline of rapidly cooled lava flows. When people settle the island they naturally used locally available building materials. For Pico that meant charcoal-black volcanic rocks.…

  • The Big Obsidian Flow

    Deschutes County, Oregon, USA (July 2012) The Big Obsidian Flow has an appropriate albeit unimaginative name for this geological structure in central Oregon, just east of the Cascades. It is indeed a big obsidian flow. It forms part of the vast Newberry National Volcanic Monument, founded in 1990 within the Deschutes National Forest, and specifically…

  • Select African Superlatives

    I thought I’d lump another set of somewhat related items together as I continued to cull the enormous backlog of possible Twelve Mile Circle topics. However, they didn’t have much in common except that they all involved continental Africa. Two involved geographical observations and the other two related to geological oddities. All of them piqued…