This is my favourite photo from my recent trip to Armenia. It may not seem so interesting but it tells a really cool story.
What you are seeing is the core from a borehole we drilled recently and it is fab!
So at the top of the photo is the core from nearest the surface moving down through the ground, just like reading a book (left to right, line by line).
At the top we have soil underlain weathered material (stuff that was rock initially but that has been altered to clay) lying on top of basalt rock, nothing strange there! However after about 12 metres of basalt we start to get into weathered material again including what appears to be river gravel! So what you are seeing in the photo is the soil and weathered material overlying an ancient lava flow (the basalt) which in itself is overlying an ancient landscape that the lava flowed over. Pretty great, reading the story of history from the core like a book (a very very fuzzy book where you have to fill in most of the details yourself but a book nonetheless.
When I close my eyes I can picture the lava flowing over a stream and the clouds of steam rising up as a result all those millions of years ago, all from reading the core, how cool is that!
