Basalt

Børre Basalt is a lava rock. He flowed out as molten stone a long time ago, when there were volcanoes in the area. You can find a lot of him on the ocean floor.

One thing I’ve picked up: volcanoes are cool! Maybe not exactly when the ash messes up what you call airplanes, but that’s just part of volcanic activity.

I am actually old lava that flowed out from a volcano 294 million years ago. Or something like that. Back then, there were several volcanoes around the Geopark. I was transported by the ice from Vestfold, or maybe from Skien. There’s a lot of basalt lava there too. Before I flowed out of the volcano, I was a mass of molten rock deep down in the Earth. I pushed my way up through cracks I found, making even more and bigger cracks. When I flowed out onto the Earth’s surface, I was really hot! It was much colder up here, and then I solidified.

Inside me, there were lots of gas bubbles, and these bubbles were trapped inside me when I solidified. Do you see my white spots? Those are such gas bubbles-now, some new, white grains have grown where the gas used to be.

Not all basalts look exactly like me. Some of us can have bits of glass, others can have holes and pits, and some might have darker spots. But we can all boast about being from volcanoes-that’s pretty cool!