A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
lava tree
A lava tree is a hollow upright pillar of lava standing where a living tree used to be. A flow moving through forest wraps a wet trunk, and the water in the wood chills the lava against it into a solid crust. If the flow then drains away, the crust is left standing as a column, with the tree burning out from inside and leaving a mold that carries the bark pattern in the rock.
Etymology
The name is a plain description, and it is the counterpart of the lava tube. Both are hollow lava forms left when a flow drains out from inside something it had already hardened around.
Notes
Lava Tree State Monument on the island of Hawaii preserves a stand of them from a 1790 flow, standing in rows through second-growth forest. Where the flow did not drain, the result is the opposite feature: a tree mold, a vertical shaft in the solidified rock where the trunk stood, sometimes deep enough to lower a person into and sometimes preserving the grain of the wood.