The story begins as early as 1.5 billion years ago, when red-hot magma and sky-high mountains marked the ground in this area.
When you travel along the North Sea Road, from Flekkefjord and all the way through Eigersund municipality, you drive in Magma UNESCO Global Geopark. This is a unique place with unique geology and cultural history.
“When you arrive at Magma Geopark you enter an area that was once more than 20 km below the earth's surface and a huge mountain range the size of the Himalayas.”
The word geology means the study of the Earth. Geologists study processes that, as a rule, go very slowly, but which over millions of years can create great things such as opening an ocean or closing an ocean, forming deserts or deep seas, or forming endless steppes or towering mountains and mountain ranges. At other times, the geological processes can also proceed very quickly, such as in the case of a landslide or a volcanic eruption. In a geopark you can learn about all this and much else exciting about how the nature around us came to be.
Magma UNESCO Geopark is one of today's 140 UNESCO global geoparks in the world with a completely unique European geology. When you arrive at Magma Geopark you enter an area that was once more than 20 km below the earth's surface and a huge mountain range the size of the Himalayas. Down here, the rocks around you were liquid magma (liquid molten rock), more than ten times hotter than boiling water. At this high temperature and enormous pressure, the magma began to slowly cool and crystallize (solidify), forming some interesting igneous rocks with large crystals. An example of such a rock is anorthosite, which is the same rock that you find on the surface of the moon. In Magma Geopark you can therefore literally walk on the moon. The large mountain range that lay above Magma Geopark has, over a thousand million years, been worn away by warm periods and cold periods. Many of the cold periods were so cold that we call them ice ages and where we then had large glaciers that covered the whole country. This has actually happened about 200 times. At the end of the last ice age, which ended only about 10,000 years ago, the ice and enormous amounts of water from the melting ice put the final finishing touch on the landscape, leaving behind bla.a multitude of exciting sculptures in the form of stones of all shapes and sizes, where some stand on tiptoes, others on top of each other and some have only slipped out and not moved far like Trollpikken. After the Ice Age, the Stone Age began and people came migrating across the ice from Denmark and settled at the ice front and lived by hunting. Later in the Bronze Age, people settled down more permanently and began to build and cultivate the land. In Magma Geopark we find traces of people through the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Viking Age, Middle Ages, modern times and the great wars, where the different times and events have affected the area in different ways. In Magma Geopark you can come and hear all the exciting stories about how geological processes and man have created and influenced nature and the landscape as we see it today.
Let yourself be inspired by our film from Magma UNESCO Global Geopark. www.magmageopark.no
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