Humans have a long tradition of taking rocks and making pretty things with them. Usually, when you think of sculpture, you think of marble, right? I mean, of course, marble – marble’s a wonderful stone for sculptors, very hard and yet amenable to people carving and polishing it.
If I asked you for an igneous rock suitable for making art with, what would you give me? Big ol’ chunk of something in the granite family? Good choice! Polishes up a treat, that does, and it’s very monumental.
Here’s another igneous rock you could use:
Yes, you can use the Columbia River Basalts for some very impressive geoart.
You run across them in unexpected places. You’ll be bopping down the street, and suddenly – columns. The images above and below are in a cluster near a Burger King in Burien, Washington.
The columns are quite popular for things like fountains.
These are huge, and heavy – this is an iron-rich rock. Some are rather easier to handle:
I’m not sure what it is with basalt and Burger King around the Northwest.
If you’re ever walking along the Sammamish River in Woodinville, WA, keep an eye out for this towering beauty.
You can see how well this rock takes a polish – like a mirror up there. It’s a pretty fine-grained stone, and you can do very interesting things with the contrast between weathered, carved, and polished surfaces.
It’s even a suitable surface for cartography.
And when winter comes along, you’ll see ice working to enhance the effect on the fountains.
Betcha never quite thought of basalt this way, but it’s an example of what I’ve always thought: even the most boring and prosaic old rocks can be beautiful. Sometimes, it’s for their story. Sometimes, it’s because they become a new story in an artist’s hands.
If you want to see these columns in their original context, I have some images here. Your jaw will drop at Dry Falls, guaranteed.
Originally published at Scientific American/Rosetta Stones.
Now I really want a fountain made of columnar basalt. Drooool….
The first question is do you want a more matte finish (as seen above) or a finish like a lot of kitchen countertops. This is really a choice of mineral size. Basalt will have very small minerals due to its fast cooling (being near the surface). However if you look at gabbro (which of course is basalt that crystalized at depth) you have much larger mineral grains which may polish out better. Interestingly if you look at lab optical tables they are basically large blocks of basalt, with a surface that like the Stewart Park monument above. (up to 8foot by 10 foot in size) You set your lasers and optical devices on the block and the weight of the block cancels out a lot of vibrations.
Optical tables appear to have changed since I last saw one in the mid 1970s they are no longer made of big rocks but stainless steel now.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com has a dodgy security cert, only way to see the pics at those URLs is to add an exception. Or copy/paste and change it to plain http.
…erm, or it could just be my HTTPS Everywhere extension trying to convert http into https where it shouldn’t…
Beautiful pictures, clever people. Thank you!