Upper Silesia - short trip

I’d like to visit Iceland. This is a fabulous land and Mecca for geologists that lets us see a lot of geological processes forming the surface of our planet – volcanos, geysers, solfatares... Unfortunatelly, the airlines that were supposed to provide cheap flights to this country have spectacularly collapsed, so we’ll have to wait longer. Instead of this we headed south for Gliwice.

The local slag heads resembled volcanic cones... where self-ignition occured as the coal at their tops started burning and smoking. You can even see some fire coming from below the stones. And there is this smell of sulphur in the air everywhere, so you start feeling dizzy after two hours. Once I heard a story about a man looking for coal who fell into a recess in such a slag head...

In high temperature black coal shales turn into „bricks”. This process helps to preserve these fossils in every detail. It also has decorative value - there is a difference between black, dirty and red-yellow shale.

Burning slag heads have been a serious problem as their extinguishing is almost impossible. Fortunately, someone came up with the idea of using these burnt parts as aggregate in road works. For us this is a good opportunity to collect some fossils... Next time I’ll bring some sausages for a barbecue.