Fife Rocks! Series: Fossil Tree Root EarthCache
Fife Rocks! Series: Fossil Tree Root
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This is the tenth cache in a series inspired by the Geological Wall at St Andrews.
The Geological Wall contains 22 rocks collected from all over Fife. A leaflet created by the St Andrews Geological Heritage Project gives details of each rock, along with Ordnance Survey grid references of their source localities. Hopefully this series will end up taking cachers to each of these localities. It is my intention to hide the caches as close as possible to the grid references given in the leaflet - this may mean that the caches are not necessarily going to be hidden in scenic, historical or interesting places! The information about the rock given below has been adapted from the Geological Wall leaflet.
Britains huge coal reserves, which fuelled the Industrial Revolution, were produced from the decayed remains of tropical forests. Here at Crail, a distinct fossilised tree stump can be seen at the above co-ordinates. Among the forest trees were giant club mosses which grew up to 35 metres in height. However it is their roots which are more commonly preserved and can be seen as small round dimples which mark where the rootlets emerged from the main root. Look carefully and you will see that some of the rocks surrounding the fossil tree stump contain such dimples.
Most wood fossils have been formed by permineralisation, otherwise known as petrification. In the case of the tree root here, it is likely that when this area became submerged with water millions of years ago, sediment would have covered it. Water would have seeped in slowly and rock-like minerals in it gradually replaced the original material to form this fossil. The fossil has the same shape as the original object, but chemically it is more like rock.
There is another fossil tree stump near this one - see if you can spot it while you are here. Have a look near the cliffs too - they are made of a very soft layered rock which breaks off easily - this is shale and fossils can be sometimes be found in it. Cheetah boy and I have found several fossils here - they looked like wide black grass blades. Shale is a fine-grained sedimentary rock which would have been formed from clay minerals or mud deposited on the sea bed millions of years ago.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS CACHE SHOULD ONLY BE ATTEMPTED BY PEOPLE WHO ARE REASONABLY AGILE. Be careful if you intend to take children or dogs here. Stout footwear should be worn and it is recommended that you check the tide tables as you may not be able to access the cache location during high tide. Tide information can be had from the Forth Coastguard - Tel. 01333 450666.
There is no vehicular access to the harbour, so park in one of the nearby side streets. Make your way down to the harbour and cross the small beach. The next part will be difficult and potentially dangerous if you are not extremely careful with your footing. To reach the cache you will have to climb over two ridges of tilted rock strata - both of which appear to be constantly slippery in many parts. Please take your time and test each part tentatively before putting your foot down to take your weight. You may also find that in order to traverse safely, you have to use your hands in places. Although these ridges are the hardest areas to cross, the terrain between them, and the final section to the cache, is also full of rocks of all shapes and sizes, and again, many of these may be slippy and wet so be careful on these parts too.
When you have reached the co-ordinates you should clearly see the fossil tree stump (it looks just like a tree stump only made of stone!).
In order to log this cache you must do both of the following:
(1) estimate the age of the tree (see below)
(2) take a photo of yourself and/or GPS near the stump
Obviously we have no idea of what species this tree would have been, and it is not possible to measure the annual growth rings which it would have had when alive, but for the purposes of the calculation, let’s just assume that the average width of one annual ring from this tree was 0.5 centimetres.
Estimate the average radius (distance from the centre of the trunk to the outer edge) of this tree in centimetres and divide by 0.5cm to work out an approximate age for the tree.
e.g. a tree with a radius of 20cm would be 40 years old (20 divided by 0.5 = 40)
Please email me with your answer to (1) – do not include it in your log. Thankyou.
Additional Hints
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