I don’t want to spend too much time talking about pillow basalts when you can search for amazing videos of them forming.

While we associate these beautiful structures with geologically exotic places sporting active volcanoes, they can also be found across Ireland and the UK. The picture above is from a little adventure I had around Sand Point north of Weston-super-Mare with a lovely Romanian man (please text me back!!).

I told him I was looking for extrusive volcanic rocks amidst extensive exposures of Carboniferous limestone. He obviously didn’t think I was sane, but politely didn’t get in my way either. I took a few images of some of the rock formations and headed back home concluding I was in the wrong place. It was only later when speaking to a fellow geoscience student I learned that the exact rocks in the bottom image were the pillow basalts!

Anyways, that’s an adventure for another time.

https://geologyviewer.bgs.ac.uk/