Many people mistakingly believe Erewhon is "Nowhere" written backwards. It is instead an anagram, perhaps a practical joke played by early author Samuel Butler, the original runholder of Mesopotamia Station, which included originally the stations now known as Mesopotamia, Mt Potts, and Erewhon.
The vast Rangitata Glacier once flowed here, with its fragmented remnants now found only high in the headwaters of the Clyde and Havelock rivers, to your northwest from Mt Sunday. The confluence of these two rivers inspired the name of the Mesopotamia Station for the land around here, from the biblical Persian location in Iraq, where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers meet.
Mt Sunday is a geological relic known as a roche moutonnee, with evidence of the ice that created it still present in gougings on the summit rocks.
Roche moutonnée (Wikipedia)
In glaciology, a roche moutonnée (or sheepback) is a rock formation created by the passing of a glacier. The passage of glacier ice over underlying bedrock often results in asymmetric erosional forms as a result of abrasion on the "stoss" (upstream) side of the rock and plucking on the "lee" (downstream) side. These erosional features are seen on scales of less than a metre to several hundred metres.
The 18th-century Alpine explorer Horace-Bénédict de Saussure coined the term roches moutonnées in 1786. He saw in these rocks a resemblance to the wigs that were fashionable amongst French gentry in his era and which were smoothed over with mutton fat (hence moutonnée) so as to keep the hair in place.[1] The French term is often incorrectly interpreted as meaning "sheep rock".
The contrasting appearance of the erosional stoss and lee aspects is very defined on roches moutonnées; all the sides and edges have been smoothed and eroded in the direction that the glacier that once passed over it. It is often marked with glacial striations.
The rough and craggy down-ice (leeward) side is formed by plucking or quarrying, an erosional process initiated when ice melts slightly by pressure and seeps into cracks in the rock. When the water refreezes, the rock becomes attached to the glacier. But as the glacier continues its forward progress it subjects the stone to frost shattering, ripping pieces away from the rock formation. Studies show that the plucking of the lee side is a much more significant erosional process than the abrasion of the stoss side.
The side profile of a stoss and lee glaciated, bedrock knob (an erosional feature) is opposite to that of a drumlin (a depositional feature). In a drumlin, the steep side is facing the approaching glacier, rather than trailing it.
Even larger examples are known from Sweden where they are referred to as flyggbergs. Ice-smoothed bedrock bumps which lack the steep, plucked lee side faces are referred to as whalebacks or rock drumlins.
Prest (1983) specifies a distinction between a glaciated "roches moutonnees surface" and a simple "stoss and lee" glacial feature. He says that the term "roches moutonnees surface" has been abused in the literature in which the term became interchangeable with the term "stoss and lee". He points out that a "roches moutonnees surface" is a continuous bedrock surface having a resemblance to the continuous, wavy or undulating rows of curls seen in French wigs at the time of Horace de Saussure while a simple stoss and lee feature refers only to a bedrock knob having a smooth stoss side and a plucked lee side appearance
Questions/ taks for this Earthcache, please send to the Cache Owner via the messages function or email:
1. On which end of Mt Sunday would you suggest the "stoss" is located?
2. (Optional) Please post a photograph from Mt Sunday with your GPS device/ phone, also showing the meeting/ confluence of the two aforementioned rivers.
3. Describe the wetland feature immediately below the lee end of the Mt Sunday roche moutonee. Is it full or empty today?
You can log your find with your picture, but we will check messages/ emails to ensure the required answers are also forwarded.
Enjoy your vist to Edoras!!!