Bleasdell Boulder EarthCache
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You will be visiting a conservation area north of Trenton Ontario. The terrain is wheel-chair friendly, except in winter.
While clawing boulder after boulder from their fields, many farmers have cursed the last ice age, claiming bitterly that all they harvested each year was a new crop of rocks. And they aren't far wrong, for in fields infested with boulders, the freezing and thawing of the ground in the spring in fact squeeze a fresh crop of boulders from beneath the surface.
Most such rocks were deposited during the last ice age, which some scientists claim covered Ontario as much as a kilometre deep. As the ice sheets cracked and began to melt about 20,000 years ago, the torrents of meltwater spewed sand, gravel and rocks into the gaping crevasses. In Central Ontario, the ice sheet melted in a long line, and the glacial debris formed a ridge of rocky and sandy hills. A boulder line that stretches from Orangeville in the west to Trenton in the east was dubbed the Oak Ridges Moraine by geologists.
It is at Trenton that the ice disgorged its biggest boulder, one the size of a house. Geologists call it the Glen Miller erratic, their name for boulders that the ice sheets carried far from their parent bedrock. This is the largest known erratic in Ontario, and one of the largest in North America. It is composed of Grenville marble, and patches of course quartz, actinolite, and tremolite. The average height of the boulder is about 6.3 metres.
In order to log this cache, you must:
1:Submit a picture of you and/or your group with the boulder in the background.
In a seperate mailing to us:
2: Find 3 different plants on the rock, and describe them to us. If you can name them, that is all the better.
3: What is the estimated weight of the boulder?
4: Estimate the circumference of the boulder.
Additional Hints
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Treasures
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