Grand Pre Drumlin EarthCache

Grand Pre Drumlin

From the viewpoint on Old Post Road you will be standing on the edge of a drumlin. Drumlins make excellent farmlands. Facing North you will see the expanse  dammed land which is now dykelands and the World Heritage Site with the Memorial Church. The cliffs of Blomidon are in the far distance and to the east and to the west are dyke protected farmland. Interestingly you will see Long Island which lies to the north of the dyked land. It is now not an island due to the dykes that have been made to protect the dykeland and not allow the water to flow through but naturally is an island.

A drumlin, from the Irish word droimnín ("littlest ridge"), first recorded in 1833, and in the classical sense is an elongated or elongated hill in the shape of an inverted spoon or half-buried egg formed by glacial ice acting on underlying unconsolidated till or ground moraine being formed by the streamlined movements of the glacial ice sheets across rock debris, or till. Drumlins are often associated with smaller, glacially streamlined bedrock forms known as roches moutonnées. Drumlins are commonly found in clusters numbering in the thousands.They can be up to 7 km in length, 2 km in width and 30 m in height. There is no single composition typical of a drumlin, but most have a carapace of lodgement till.

There are 2 types of Drumlin, ROCK drumlins and TILL drumlins. A Till drumlin is a hill of compact, unstratified glacial drift or till, usually elongate or oval, with the larger axis parallel to the former local glacial motion. Drumlins (the crest of a hill) are a typical subglacial landform. A rock drumlin has a central core of rock!

Glaciers in Maritime Canada, Geology:

Ice from the glaciers at this time was hundreds of feet thick. When it moved down the valleys, it pushed everything in its path like a huge U-shaped bulldozer. Valleys were smoothed, widened, and deepened. Rock and soils were picked up, mixed together, and deposited as till. Often, this material was carried several miles from its origin.

Glacial growth peaked about 20,000 years ago during the Quaternary Period , after which time the ice slowly began to melt. As the ice melted, the glaciers retreated, but the basins formed by glaciers remained and filled with water from the melting glaciers.

The Quaternary Period is divided into two epochs: the Pleistocene (2.588 million years ago to 11.7 thousand years ago) and the Holocene (11.7 thousand years ago to today). The informal term "Late Quaternary" refers to the past 0.5–1.0 million years.

The variety of form and the sedimentology of drumlins suggests that these streamlined bedforms may be convergent landforms, developed by a range of glacial processes. Most drumlins have a capping layer of lodgement till. A drumlin is not originally shaped by meltwater, but by the ice itself and has a quite regular shape. It occurs in fine-grained material, such as clay or shale, not in sands and gravels. And drumlins usually have concentric layers of material, as the ice successively plasters new layers in its movement.

To log this Earthcache visit the viewing location.  Please answer the following questions and send in a timely manner to my geocaching profile or email. Answers not received will result in deleted logs.

1. The drumlin is 50m high at the top, how high is the drumlin at ground zero in meters?

2. What direction was the Glacier moving?

3. What caused/formed the island to the North?

4. There are 2 types of Drumlins, which is this one?

5. Post a picture of the view from ground zero.

[REQUIRED] In accordance with the updated guidelines from Geocaching Headquarters published in June 2019, photos are now an acceptable logging requirement and WILL BE REQUIRED TO LOG THIS CACHE. Please provide a photo of yourself or a personal item in the picture to prove you visited the site.