Cow Bay Spit / Drumlin EarthCache

Cow Bay Spit / Drumlin

Cow Bay is an unincorporated rural community within Nova Scotia along the Marine Drive scenic route. The beach is now just a short strip of gravel. You can access it through the Moose parking lot on Cow Bay Road.

Silver Sands Beach is a rocky beach, but a favourite destination for surfers! Though not great for swimming, it is still a good location for a nice stroll along the beach. The beach used to be very popular in the late 1800’s-1960’s. It was very sandy and a favourite destination for locals. In the late 1960’s the city took the sand away to be used for construction and the beach filled in with rocks.

The city felt the beach would completely rebuild itself through natural wave action, He claimed that on a beach of this type, extraction could never take the sand away, and that it would always come in again during the winter, and found the supply of sand and gravel which the sea washed on shore was almost inexhaustible. It seems they were wrong.

Silver sands is a long spit with a hook at the end and an opening allowing water in and out from the large body of water behind it. (Cow Bay Lake) In the middle of the body of water you will see a larger island called Moses Island which is 0.23 acres. It is a drumlin that was deposited by a glacier. As these drumlins, made up of glacial matter, erode over time, they supply the beach with sediment by distributing various types of material in different directions a process known as sortation.

Sortation

Sorting (Sortation) is a term usually applied to sediments or sedimentary rock, and describes the degree of uniformity of grain size.  The degree of sorting depends upon how much transport the sediment has undergone.

Well-sorted sediments have grains of similar size, and are the result of  much sediment transport and earth processes which segregated the sediment by depositing different size fractions in different places. Coarse sediments are usually found closest to the source area because they are too heavy to be transported far, while fine sediments such as silt and clay travel the farthest.

Poorly-sorted sediments have grains of varying sizes, and are evidence of sediments that have been deposited fairly close to the source area, i.e., have not undergone much transport.; Stream bed gravel (a sediment) or conglomerate (a sedimentary rock) containing sand and silt is an example of a rounded, poorly-sorted sediment (1st diagram). Glacial till, containing a mixture of coarse angular rock fragments, sand, silt, and clay, was deposited by the slow plowing action of an ice sheet, and is a good example of an angular, poorly-sorted sediment.

Spits

Spits are also created by deposition. A spit is an extended stretch of beach material that projects out to sea and is joined to the mainland at one end. Spits are formed where the prevailing wind blows at an angle to the coastline, resulting in longshore drift.

Drumlin

Drumlins are generally found in broad lowland regions, with their long axes roughly parallel to the path of glacial flow. Although they come in a variety of shapes, the glacier side is always high and steep, while the lee side is smooth and tapers gently in the direction of ice movement.

Most drumlins are composed of till, but they may vary greatly in their composition. Some contain significant amounts of gravel, whereas others are made up of rock underlying the surface till (rock drumlins).

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Questions:

Bonus - What water sport is done here?

1. How long is the spit and what is it made of?

2. Is there sortation on the beach? Describe the sortation.

3. Which side of the spit does the drumlin sit on (NEWS)?

4. How did the drumlin get there?

5. Would the body of water behind the spit be fresh salt or brackish?

6. 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.