Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway is a sight to behold. It doesn’t make sense. How can the Earth produce something so geometrically consistent, with its series of hexagonal pillars matting the landscape, when everything else seems so random? It’s so incredible that it even has its own mythology: an Irish giant with the extremely cool name of Finn McCool built it as a bridge across the sea so he could fight a Scottish giant named Benandonner.

Hell yeah.

Unfortunately, a new study published in Geology uses science to ruin a perfectly good badass story about giant-on-giant violence to instead offer an explanation for the origins of the Giant’s Causeway that’s grounded in reality. The good news is that the proposed actual explanation for the Giant’s Causeway’s origin is something that is also still pretty cool: volcanoes.

Scientists from the British Geological Survey and the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland have used modern dating techniques to refine the timeline behind the formation of the Giant’s Causeway. The formation, which is made up of around 40,000 interlocking basalt columns, might have been created by geological processes that happened a lot faster than previously believed, and were likely part of a huge volcanic event that shaped a lot of the North Atlantic around 60 million years ago.

This Giant’s Causeway Theory Isn’t New, But the Details Are

The idea that the Causeway might’ve been, well, caused by volcanic activity isn’t new. What is new is our idea of how long it took to form. Previous theories suggest that it took somewhere around 13.5 million years. This new analysis cuts that time down to about 5.5 million years, linking the Causeway more directly to volcanic formations that have been found around Scotland, Greenland, Ireland, and in other parts of the ancient North Atlantic.

This was way back when Greenland was still connected to what we now know as the United Kingdom, and volcanic eruptions were still shaping continents into the landmasses we know them as today. The North Atlantic Ocean was just beginning to open.

As for the freakishly perfect hexagonal columns, scientists say they formed when huge sheets of lava cooled and then contracted. As stress was slowly building within all that rock, it would crack into repeating geometric patterns called columnar joints, examples of which can be found all over the world. Maybe the most famous example outside of the Giant’s Causeway is the famous Devils Tower National Monument in Butte, Wyoming, which you might remember as the mountain Richard Dreyfuss was mystically drawn to in the Steven Spielberg movie Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

For as perfect as the columns seem, they are still quite imperfect. A lot of them are six-sided, though some have four, some have five, some have seven, some have a lot more.

It’s a less exciting explanation than Finn McCool hurling chunks of coastline into the sea to challenge a rival giant. But a volcano sculpting thousands of gorgeous, oddly precise stone columns is mightily impressive and deserves to be a legend in its own right.