10/27/2024
☑️ . I needed Fiona🐎 to get this one done. (Not really, but it was more fun this way).😅
Lake Crowley Columns is a unique geological formation in the Mammoth area at Lake Crowley, off Hwy 395. It was a thrilling 4WD to TH, then a steep 1/2 mile hike on loose sandy terrain down to the beach area where the columns are.
**Crowley Lake Columns are made of volcanic rock and were formed over 760,000 years ago as a result of a massive volcanic eruption. The columns are up to 20 feet tall and connected by high arches, and they have been compared to the ruins of an ancient Moorish temple. They had been buried and hidden for eons until the reservoir’s pounding waves began carving out the softer material at the base of cliffs of pumice and ash.
The volcanic blast was 2,000x larger than the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, which created the Long Valley Caldera, a massive 10-by-2-mile sink that includes the Mammoth Lakes area. It also covered much of the eastern Sierra Nevada range with a coarse volcanic tuff, or ash fall.
The columns began forming as snowmelt seeped into the still hot tuff. The water boiled, creating “evenly spaced convection cells similar to heat pipes,” according to the study to be presented next month in San Francisco at an American Geophysical Union meeting, the world’s largest conference in geophysical sciences.
Analyses by X-rays and electronic microscopes of samples of the columns found that tiny spaces in these convection pipes were cemented into place by erosion-resistant minerals.”
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