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Scientists May Have Finally Solved the Mystery of the Legendary Giant’s Causeway

Using science to ruin a perfectly good badass story about giant-on-giant violence. What a shame.

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Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway is a sight to behold. It doesn’t make sense. How can the Earth produce something so geometrically consistent, with its series of hexagonal pillars matting the landscape, when everything else seems so random? It’s so incredible that it even has its own mythology: an Irish giant with the extremely cool name of Finn McCool built it as a bridge across the sea so he could fight a Scottish giant named Benandonner.

Unfortunately, a new study published in Geology uses science to ruin a perfectly good badass story about giant-on-giant violence to instead offer an explanation for the origins of the Giant’s Causeway that’s grounded in reality. The good news is that the proposed actual explanation for the Giant’s Causeway’s origin is something that is also still pretty cool: volcanoes.

Scientists from the British Geological Survey and the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland have used modern dating........

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