the.com/basalt
the lava that cooled into Earth's most underrated building material and the Moon's dark seas
means A dark, fine-grained volcanic rock formed when lava cools quickly at or near the surface, making up much of the ocean floor, many lava flows, and those dusky lunar plains.
from From Latin 'basaltes,' a variant of 'basanites,' which Pliny the Elder borrowed from Greek 'basanos' — a dark touchstone used to test gold. The word likely traveled into Greek from an Egyptian or African source for a hard dark stone. So the name of Earth's most common volcanic rock traces back, fittingly, to a stone that judged the purity of kings' gold.
- ocean floor
- Most of the seafloor is basalt
- giant's causeway
- Cools into eerie hexagonal columns
- lunar maria
- The Moon's dark patches are basalt plains
- carbon capture
- Reacts with CO2, locking it into stone
- on mars
- Most of the red planet's crust is basalt
giant's causeway — 60,000 hexagonal basalt columns on the coast of northern ireland
devils postpile — 40,000-year-old columnar basalt formation in california's sierra nevada
iceland — entire island built from basalt lava flows, covers 103,000 km²