Sultansmeer EarthCache
-
Difficulty:
-
-
Terrain:
-
Size: 
(other)
Related Web Page
Please note Use of geocaching.com services is subject to the terms and conditions
in our disclaimer.
Sultanslake/Sultansmeer
Sultanslake is a small lake nearby Weerwille, a settlement in south-west Drenthe, a northern province in The Netherlands. A second lake is nearby.
The WMD (drinkingwater government) owns this terrain, so please obey their rules while doing this cache.
Both lakes are formed by winning peat from the original bog they were about 150 years ago. This bog was formed in so called pingo-ruines during many thousands of years.
Now the Sultansmeer is a fishing and ice-skating lake surrounded by nature. The second lake has no name and is totally in use by mother nature.
This cache will teach you a little bit about a pingoruin, so read the text below and go see both pingoruins. The total distance is approximately 2 kilometers.
Pingo
A pingo is a small round hill with inside of it a frozen lens shaped ice core, that can arise in areas where the subsurface is permanently frozen (permafrost). Groundwater underneath this frozen subsurface is standing under enormous pressure and when a crack appears in the frozen subsurface, the water is being pushed up. The water is unable to go trough the frozen upper ground, thus freezes and expands. Underneath this ice, the water remains under high pressure and keeps pushing the ice and upper ground up; a pingo is born. Pingo's grow only a few centimeters each year and therefore it can take decades before a hill is clearly visible.
The word pingo comes from the language of the Inuit and means "small hill that grows".
Nowadays you can find pingo's in the tundra areas of Greenland, Alaska, Svalbard and Siberia. Some pingo's can grow up to 50 meters high and 2 kilometre in diameter.
Pingoruin
In the Netherlands there was a tundra climate during the Weichsel-glacial, a period within the Pleistocene epoch about 116.000-11.500 years ago. In area’s where the groundwater was close to the subsurface pingo’s could arise. At the end of the Weichsel-glacial though, the temperature was slowly rising. At first the top of the pingo would melt and some time later also the ice core inside. The pingo collapses and sediment rolls from the sides of the hill down to the ground. What remains is a depression in the landscape surrounded by a small rampart of sediment; known as a pingoruin. In the depression arises a lake that over a period of thousands of years is being filled up with bog. The bog contains valuable information about the vegetation, which can be used to reconstruct the climate during the upholstering of the pingoruin.
Pingoruins are the best documented geological climate archives in the Netherlands and precious study objects for quaternary geologist.
To log this cache as a find do the following:
ATTENTION, Picture is not longer optional but required!!!
And before anyone wants to complain about the photo: Due to the mass dissemination of EC solutions on the Internet, GSA and Groundspeak have released the EC owners since 10 June 2019, asking for a photo as proof of the visit. Please send us the answer by our profile and upload the photo with your log. After the reply you are allowed to log immediately. If something is wrong, we will contact you. Logs without answers and without a photo are deleted without comment.
1.Park your car at N 52°43.655 E 006°17.634
Here you see an infopanel with the flora and fauna in the area. It also tells why drinkingwater is pumped up here. And keep in mind what a pingo is.
2. Go to N 52°43.585 E 006°17.569 by following signs A.
Take a picture of yourself with GPSr and the Sultanslake at the background.
2a. Cross here N52°43.728 E 006°17.578 the street. Mind the traffic
3. Move on to N 52°43.625 E 006°17.886 following signs B after signs A.
What's the color of the lock and the number of this metal water level tube? Mind the swamp!
4. Add the picture with your log and mail us the answers from #3.
Cache in, trash out! Neem altijd een plastic zak mee om zwerfvuil onderweg op te ruimen.
Additional Hints
(No hints available.)
Treasures
You'll collect a digital Treasure from one of these collections when you find and log this geocache:
Loading Treasures