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The Geology of The Barbaric Archipelago
Topic Started: 15 May 2014, 18:17 (1210 Views)
StaticTheSkrill
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The Skrill of all Skrills...

I noticed that many locations around Berk have hexagonal looking columns coming out from the top of caves or forming pathways this applies to Changewing Island and Dragon Mountain especially. I found out that these are called basalt columns, they form near lava flows or volcanoes. I feel like much of the Barbaric Archipelago has these columns... Any thoughts?
Ryuu ga waga teki wo kurau!

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Lastandir
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Gronckle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pl ... _volcanics
Artist from HTTYD1 were inspired by this place if I remember correctly :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant%27s_Causeway
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valkasboy
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Terrible Terror

I went to the island of Staffa, off the west coast of Scotland when I was younger. It's entirely made out of these basalt columns, and it's an incredible place. It's like a giant just got hold of a stack of 100 foot long rock pencils and dropped them into the sea! Fingal's Cave is there, and you can just imagine that it would be a perfect lair for a dragon!

I believe that it's also fairly close to where Cressida Cowell spent some of her youth. It's a very inspiring piece of coastline.

Add to that you have Dean Deblois' fascination with Iceland which is not that far away, and extremely volcanic, and you can see why the art director and designers wanted to use that feature. I always imagined that Valka's dragon sanctuary was warmer on the inside because of geothermal activity.
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Berknation
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[color=red]
[b]Titan Wing
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An archipelago is literally a chain of islands formed by volcanic activity. Either Berk or Dragon Island, depending on their orientation with the others, may be a volcano. Dragon Island even looks like it used to be one... so I think that it must be the most recent. Basalt, Granite mixtures of Quartz, orthoclase, and Hornblende would be the most common rocks in these regions.
If they got lucky they might find ANY mineral! Seeing as the islands are so small and the rock cycle is pretty much just erosion at this point.
That's also how those sea-stacks formed that we see jutting out from the water on the coastline in many episodes and the first movie. The weathering and break down of those rocks means that the remaining stacks are a slightly more resilient, and may even be an intrusive rock (magma that cooled under the Earth's surface but then all the other rock around it weathered away, leaving it sticking out.)

Berk has some interesting geologic features, that's for sure... the oceans must be super rough sometimes if they can break down and form the stacks and cliffs that they have now.
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StaticTheSkrill
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The Skrill of all Skrills...

Breakneck Bog seems to be quite interesting. I wonder how that formed. Smokebreaths probably evolved separately to be tHere.
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