Sandy Cove - Kettle Lake or Ancient Volcano? EarthCache

Sandy Cove - Kettle Lake or Ancient Volcano?

Sandy Cove is a community in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, located in the Municipality of the District of Digby. in Digby County on Digby Neck. The community is the birth place of Laurence Bradford Dakin. His best known work was Marco Polo: A Drama in Four Acts (1946), which reportedly sold over 30, 000 copies in the United States and was hailed by John Masefield as the "work of a genius."

In 1853, at the posted coordinates, a geologist Sir William Dawson speculated the lake might be the mouth of an ancient volcano.  There are similar craters visible elsewhere in Digby Neck which supported his speculation.  Most Geologists believe this to be a Kettle lake formed by meltwater rivers from the receding Ice Age Glaciers.  Perhaps it is both a volcanic crater further eroded by rushing glacier waters.

A kettle lake is a body of water that is formed from a glacier carving out the land. Landscapes shaped by glaciers are often dotted with small  to large kettle lakes.  Many years ago when glaciers were on many of the continents, some of the glaciers began to recede because of increasing temperatures.

As the glacier receded, chunks of the glacier broke off, carved a hole, and left debris around the hole that received water to become a lake. A deposition is a bowl-shaped depression that was formed by a block of ice from a glacier and then became filled with water. The kettle lake received its name by the shape that is left behind by the glacier. Most kettle holes are less than two kilometres in diameter, and most are less than 10 meters in depth. Silver lake is the exception with it’s depth of almost 15 meters.

In most cases, kettle holes eventually fill with water, sediment, or vegetation. If the kettle is deep enough and is fed by surface or underground rivers or streams, it becomes a kettle lake. If the kettle receives its water from precipitation, the groundwater table, or a combination of the two, it is termed a kettle pond or kettle wetland due to the vegetation. Kettle ponds that are not affected by the groundwater table will usually become dry during the warm summer months, in which case they are deemed ephemerals.

Nearby are bogs containing large amounts of diatomaceous earth, a deposit formed by the slow accumulation of silica shells from single celled plants. The central valley that contains the bogs and extends to Brier Island results from the faster erosion of the softer shale and volcanic rocks against the harder lava flows.

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Questions:

1. What is the elevation at ground zero?

2. What is the  length and width of the kettle lake?

3. What material do you see around the edge of the kettle lake?

4. Post a picture in your log with a personal item or hand in picture to prove you were there.

[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.