Cliffs
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Fri 19 Dec 2014 10:46
The southeast of Tasmania has Australia’s highest sea cliffs. Here is Cape
Hauy from the sea on a lovely calm morning:
And here is the view from the land from Cape Hauy looking along the line of
stacks:
The rock here is dolerite, a form of magma that has been intruded into
earlier rocks and then cooled slowly resulting in the very hard hexagonal
columnar structures you can see in the photo above. This magma dates from the
breakup of the gigantic southern continent of Gondwanaland during the Jurassic
era. Similar dolerites are found in South Africa and Antarctica but those in
Tasmania are huge – a staggering and almost unimaginable volume of 40 000 cubic
kilometres extruded over perhaps a million years.
And here is the view looking straight down the cliff from the path end (no
nonsense with safety fences and the like here):
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