User blog comment:Lord Loss/Monster Hunter Theory... Blog/@comment-71.203.144.9-20121026025415/@comment-173.8.54.198-20121029183904

Ash in reaction to water. That is something I sort of forgot to take into consideration actually, Dax the hunter. I was so set on volcanic ash that I pretty much completely forgot that the floors in most of the areas in the swamps are soggy and have plants that can only grow in soft watery soil. So the visible layers of the swamp could not have trully been formed by deposits of ash and lava. However, most of the swamp is covered in moss, trees, roots, and some mudlike stuff. Perhaps years of biological buildup could have given the swamps that particular muddy look and soggy feeling that pretty much makes them swamps. So maybe the formation of the swamps is not directly related to volcanic activity, though common sense should have told me that anyways. The formation of the swamps themselves should be independent of volcanic activity, but the large rock and crystal formations in the caves show that there was geothermal or volcanic activity in those areas at some point.