What A Face EarthCache
-
Difficulty:
-
-
Terrain:
-
Size: 
(not chosen)
Please note Use of geocaching.com services is subject to the terms and conditions
in our disclaimer.
Image yourself back in the time of settles moving up the mountain from Wikes County and crossing over to settle to Boone and then trying to head to Kentucky or Tennessee and then coming across a mountain with a face! What would be racing through your head
The Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee are the result of the action of plate tectonics. The crust of our planet is composed of five primary plates, or huge pieces of rock which move very slowly over deeper layers of hot, pliable rock.
(insert picture)
Some of the plates are composed of heavy oceanic crust, while others are made of lighter continental crust. At the middle of each oceanic plate a large crack pours forth lava onto the ocean floor. This causes oceanic plates to expand an inch or two every year. When oceanic crust is forced against continental crust, the oceanic crust is pushed underneath the continental crust. When continental crust is forced against continental crust, huge mountains usually are formed.
The Appalachian Mountains were formed in the remote past by collision of two continental crusts. During such mountain building, huge sheets of rock are pushed over each other. A rock layer called the Blue Ridge Thrust Sheet was moved over 60 miles to cover what is now Grandfather Mountain.
These mountains were once much higher (10 times as high!) than they are today. Erosion over hundreds of millions of years has carried away most of the rocks to form thick layers of sediment all across the Piedmont, Coastal Plain, and in the Atlantic Ocean. At Grandfather mountain, erosion has worn away the Blue Ridge Thrust Sheet from over top of the underlying older rock, allowing us to study them. Geologists call this a "window" in time.
Rocks on Grandfather Mountain are generally metamorphic. Pressure, heat, and the introduction of new substances cause metamorphism during mountain building. Changes include the development of new minerals, making a rock which has been deeply buried and compressed look very different from the original rock. Around the Nature Museum and at Split Rock you will encounter metamorphosed conglomerate. Around the upper parking lot the rocks are phyllite or meta-siltstone. The Swinging Bridge is built on granular pebble conglomerate rocks.
Well Grandfather Mountain, which is located on the Blue Ridge mountain and the highest peak in the chain which runs parrel with the Appalachian Chain. The face was made out of the process of metasandstone and metaconglomerate. So what is Clastic & Conglomeratic Metasandstone?
Well is the type of rock which originated from conglomerate after undergoing metamorphism. Conglomerate is easily identifiable by the pebbles or larger clasts in a matrix of sand, silt, or clay. Metaconglomerate looks similar to conglomerate, besides the distorted stones. The cement matrix of conglomerate is not as durable as the grains, and hence when broken, conglomerate breaks around the grains. For metaconglomerate, however, the breaks are through the grains, as the cement has recrystallized, and may be as durable as the clasts.(wiki)
1.) Take a picture with you and gps and the mountain in the background?
2.) Now that you are the foot of the mountain, look around and find a quartz rock and take a pic of it?
3.) if you where a settler back in time what would your first thought be of this mountain with a face?
Additional Hints
(No hints available.)