Mysterious Hot Hands

[Wandering Sagebrush]

Here's one to think about. Handprints in Lava. One of my buddies finally found them after years of trying.

 

[ski3pin]

This is pretty darn cool!

 

[Wandering Sagebrush]

This is pretty darn cool!

Nope, those hands were hot. ;-)

 

[Taku]

yep, weird.

 

[longhorn1]

Awesome

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Wander The West mobile app

 

[MarkBC]

Maybe it was some gruesome religious ritual -- like when Kwai Chang Caine picked up the red-hot hibachi with his bare forearms, branding him with his order's icons, in the "Kung Fu" TV series of the early '70s.

 

[takesiteasy]

Maybe if you do it real quickly it doesn't burn- kind of like the fire walkers.

 

[Smokecreek1]

Could be punishment of some sort, some folks had some pretty one sided punishments for using your hands for the wrong thing-does seem sort of drastic thooooo !

Smoke

 

[Foy]

It's awfully hard to figure out how these could be handprints made in hot lava. If the rock is a basalt, as indicated, look to the Hawaiian eruption going on since 1983: The flows run around 2,000 degrees F at the flowing liquid surface. Once the surface of the flow cools just a bit, a rough, clinkery "rind" forms atop the still glowing lava beneath. Seeing a smooth "non-clinkered" surface seems pretty rare (but I'm not a volcanologist!). Looking at the other patterns in the picture, it looks like ripple marks are present on more or less the same plane as the prints. Not perfect ripple marks, but enough like them to make me wonder. Lavas often do end up intersecting water (again using the Hawaiian eruption still going on as an example), and seeing a rock record of interlayered lava flows and sediments, even fine-grained silts and clays, is entirely normal where basaltic lava flows often occur in underwater rift basins. So, perhaps the handprints are impressed upon a thin layer of ripple-marked silt itself resting upon the surface of a basalt flow. One thing it seems unlikely to be is human handprints impressed on still-molten lava.