Poached Egg Stalagmites, Poole's Cavern.
Introduction
The photograph on this page of Poached Egg Stalagmites, Poole's Cavern. by Stephen Elwyn RODDICK as part of the Geograph project.
The Geograph project started in 2005 with the aim of publishing, organising and preserving representative images for every square kilometre of Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man.
There are currently over 7.5m images from over 14,400 individuals and you can help contribute to the project by visiting https://www.geograph.org.uk
Poached Egg Stalagmites, Poole's Cavern.
Image: © Stephen Elwyn RODDICK Taken: 1 Sep 2005
This bizarre set of formations is Poole’s Cavern’s one truly unique feature. The alarming looking ‘poached egg’ stalagmites are the result of human activity on the ground above the cave, combined with natural processes. Several decades of quarrying resulted in huge mounds of lime waste being dumped on the hillside. Rainwater passing through this fine material picks up an unusually large amount of lime. This results in massively accelerated calcite build-up, the largest features here having taken just 400 years to reach their present size.
Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0
Image Location
Latitude
53.249494
Longitude
-1.928023