Listen I’m trying very hard not to go there with a hamer and a chisel. But in case I couldn’t help myself to take a train to Finlande, everyone could understand the urge against which I lost.
Can anyone tell me why the bottom rock is so smooth? I imagine people come and sit on it and touch them both frequently, and that they are two rocks from different places but they each look very dissimilar. I guess what I am really asking, is the bottom rock so smooth because of the big boy topping it?
Likely glaciation, the bottom rock was likely on the bottom of an ice sheet and millions of tons of ice moving over it over time had smoothed it out.
The top rock is probably from many miles away and was carried and placed there from the receding glacier. To me the top rock looks like it is a completely different type of stone then the bottom.
It’s bad enough that this post is a direct copy of a trending Reddit post (down to the weird number formatting), to find the comments are also just copy pasted highlights of stunning lack of originality
The age sends my imagination racing, I wonder if there was a Proto-Indo-European name for it, as a remote curiosity/enigma.
“They say that somewhere up north, half a moon beyond the most remote village, there is a large stone put on top of another by the hand of the Earth Goddess herself.”
After some googling, some of the heavier rock types are 3g/cm^3, which is 3000kg/m^3
If we use the person as a rough ruler of 1.6m, the rock is about 5 person wide, and 3 person high (eye measure), give or take. And if we say it’s 3 person deep, then it has a rough mass of 5331.63000 = 216 000 kg, which is in the same order of magnitude.
Close enough to check out, I’d say.
Edit: I realized since the actual ruler we use is 1.6m (assumed), it should be multiplied by 1.6 three times (one for each dimension/length), not just once. If we do that, we end up with 921 600 kg instead, putting 500 000 kg well within the range of possibilities from a quick calculation.
Edit 2: as pointed out below, the actual correct estimation would be 553 tons
5331.6 is not the same as (51.6)(31.6)(31.6), however
The reason we multiply with 1.6 on every dimension is because the ruler we use is 1.6m long. We effectively create a new unit, and have to convert. If a length is 5 person wide, then in reality it’s 5*1.6 = 8 meters long, where 1.6 is the conversion ratio from the unit of ‘person’ to the unit of ‘meter’. And this applies for every individual measurement.
Also, 5331.6 is not the same as (51.6)+(31.6)+(31.6) in the first place
The ice sheet covering northern europe started to melt away, and with that we got what is called “glacial erratics”. Rocks had traveled from once place to another, and then settled. In Sweden we call those “giants throw”, because it was assumed that the only way those big rocks could be where they are was if a giant had thrown it.
I think we have the same terminology then, we also call them “flyttblock”. Is there a story behind them being called Devil’s rock? It sounds very finnish to me to be honest.
Well “hiisi” translates to “devil” but that’s very much a political translation as far as such things existed back then.
Translating “Hiisi” as “the Devil” is quite a fuck-the-pagans translation.
Hiisi (Finnish pronunciation: [ˈhiːsi]; plural hiidet [ˈhiːdet]) is a term in Finnic mythologies, originally denoting sacred localities and later on various types of mythological entities
Hiisi was originally a spirit of hill forests (Abercromby 1898). In Estonian hiis (or his) means a sacred grove in trees, usually on elevated ground. In the spells (“magic songs”) of the Finns the term Hiisi is often used in association with a hill or mountain, as a personage he also associated with the hills and mountains, such as the owner or ruler of the same. His name is also commonly associated with forests, and some forest animals.
Not being close to a plate does not necessarily mean only small quakes.
There were a series of what today would be absolutely devastating earthquakes in the Midwestern U.S., far from any tectonic plates, between 1811 and 1812.
Being in the middle of the large and relatively stable Eurasian plate does help, though. The Mediterranean region, being closer to the edge region, does experience quite a bit more, though, and some strong ones have historically been felt all the way up here, too.
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