To log this earthcache, please don’t stress about answering the questions. Simply send your best attempts in a private message to me, (the cache owner), and then go ahead and log it as found.
You don’t need to wait for my approval. All attempts will be accepted.
Go ahead and have fun learning! 
- [REQUIRED] Please post a photo in your log of yourself or a personal item that shows the Devil's Staircase to prove you visited the site.
- Describe the differences in texture and colour of the staircase in comparison to the surrounding granite.
- What is the age of the Devil's Staircase compared to the rock around it?
For a bit of history first, Sambro Island hosts the oldest surviving lighthouse in North America and its construction was a National Historic Event of Canada. The island is located at the entrance to Halifax Harbour, Nova Scotia, near the community of Sambro in the Halifax Regional Municipality.
Most of the island is made up of granite. The granite itself is part of the greater "South Mountain Batholith", which is present in about half of southern Nova Scotia. A batholith is a great mass of rock (usually granite) which originally formed well beneath a mountain range above it, and cooled slowly. (allowing the formation of the familiar crystals in granite). Over millions of years of erosion, the upper mountains have been all but wiped away, exposing much of the batholith. The granite is quite a bit more resistant to erosion than the other rock types of the original mountain range (slate and quartzite), and forms more prominent hills and ridges at the surface.
Within the granite on Sambro Island is an intrusion dike the locals call "The Devil's Staircase". An intrusion dike occurs when a vertical crack forms in existing rock, allowing magma to intrude into it, and cool into a different type of rock. Quite often the dike is a harder rock than the type surrounding it, and less susceptible to erosion, leading to interesting formations. (like sea stacks).
Dike intrusion is a process where magma within a tabular-shaped body ascends upward into or moves laterally within the earth’s upper crust. Distinct deformational landforms result from dike intrusion, including aligned basaltic vents, fissures, and, in some cases, sets of tension cracks, monoclines, and small normal faults that form small grabens. Where magmatic dikes intersect the surface, they erupt to form spatter cones, eruptive fissures, low shield volcanoes, and lava flows.
An intrusive dike is an igneous body with a very high aspect ratio, which means that its thickness is usually much smaller than the other two dimensions. Thickness can vary from sub-centimetre scale to many metres, and the lateral dimensions can extend over many kilometres. A dike is an intrusion into an opening cross-cutting fissure, shouldering aside other pre-existing layers or bodies of rock; this implies that a dike is always younger than the rocks that contain it. Dikes are usually high-angle to near-vertical in orientation, but subsequent tectonic deformation may rotate the sequence of strata through which the dike propagates so that the dike becomes horizontal. Near-horizontal, or conformable intrusions, along bedding planes between strata are called intrusive sills.
The Devil's Staircase on Sambro Island literally looks like a staircase running down the granite.
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