Giants Causeway - Is it really natural?

I was watching a program about the Giants Causeway in Ireland. I find it hard to believe that this was caused by volcanic activity as all of the stones are almost identical. Beleive it or not i dont believe the myth about the giant either.

I just wondered if anyone had any other interesting ideas on how they were formed??

Yeh i agree. Iv'e seen it before, doesn't look natural at all in my opinion. Not sure about anything else about it really.

It's absolutely natural and is called columnar jointing. It appears all over the world where volcanic rock has been uniformly cooled. You can re-create the effect by mixing cornflour and water in equal proportion and leaving it to dry out - you will be left with mostly perfectly hexagonal fissures.

Here is an example of columnar jointing at the Grand Canyon -

geoimages.berkeley.edu...

Here is an extremely comprehensive explanation of the process that forms columnar jointing -

www.physics.utoronto.ca...

Interesting to note that columnar jointing is responsible for the 'fork-scraped' appearance of the 'Devil's Tower' in Wyoming, used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Ahh right. Thanks