Monday, July 11, 2011

The Lava Field - Reprise


Wiki says: The Boring Lava Field is an extinct Plio-Pleistocene volcanic field zone with at least 32 cinder cones and small shield volcanoes lying within a radius of 13 miles (21 km) of Kelly Butte, which is approximately 4 miles (6 km) east of downtown Portland, Oregon, in the United States. The name is derived from the town of Boring, Oregon, which lies just to the southeast of the most dense cluster of lava vents. The zone became active at least 2.7 million years ago, and has been extinct for about 300,000 years.

The Portland metropolitan area, including suburbs, is one of the few places in the continental United States to have extinct volcanoes within a city's limits; Bend, Oregon is another.

Panorama showing Portland and part of the Boring Lava Field. The buttes of the Boring Lava Field are visible toward the center of this panorama of Portland, Oregon. The panorama is taken from the west hills to the south of town and sweeps north, east and southeast.

The Lava Field

I was angry once,
So hot that my hope melted
And flowed down my sides.

I am deformed, bent like that.

I have held still for so long
That dreams have begun
To form on my ruined hope,
On you in my life.

Written October 22, 2008
First Posted, January 8, 2009

6 comments:

  1. that's a fairly high concentration in 73. I wondering how far it is or how long it would take to be where a similar cluster of vents appear, the swedes. And how many bus transfers it would take to arrive, and if I know any better or worse if I read it with my hands, feeling out the braille bumps, permanently per man's desires that have been tattoo'd topographically across the surface of the sphere, here, on earth.

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  2. anger and hope can be incendiary things. so too expectation.

    xo
    erin

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  3. I really like it that I live in volcanic country, and I like it even more that it is very old volcanism. When Mt. St. Helens blew her top I was truly grateful I did not live on the mountain, nor to the northeast of it. Even south of Portland as I was, I had a couple afternoons digging out gutters where the ashfall landing on the roof clogged them after the rain that followed the eruption that did flow to the south.

    Temper tantrums are difficult sometimes. Incendiary events indeed.

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  4. Who, I am not sure where you get volcanism tying to the swedes. Sweden is truly "old" country and much of it was formed and done and just shoved around and overlaid by ice and retreat for 400 MA as they say, millions of years ago. Sweden appears to have been part of a collision zone of three archaic tectonic plates caused by the closure of an ancient ocean. There is even older country in the north, some 2.6 billions of years old, some of the oldest rocks not yet recycled by the planet, with older rocks on the Canadian shield and in Australia.

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  5. Isn't it wonderful the ten minutes of research permits me to say such things? Gotta love the internet.

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  6. Siberia is one of the most volcanic regions on the planet, by the way, but also very old.

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The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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