My Plan was to drive straight to Ottawa from Sault Ste. Marie and then I realized what the hell am I doing? Being a geo and a meteorite lover I must stop at Sudbury. The cloudy and misty day with drizzling rain made the driving a bit more exciting and it was a good change from the past few bright sunny days. All the little hills were smoking water vapors everywhere after a night long rain along my route. It was quite beautiful. For a long time there were nothing really exciting in terms of rocks along the highway but in the beginning, part of the TransCanada was divided with 90kmph speed limit.
As I got closer to Sudbury, the rocks started to look interesting with a lot of structures and hydrothermal alteration. It was getting to a point when I was having hard time keeping my eyes on the road so had to pull over for a check. They were intensely structurally deformed, dark and light banded rocks with some areas having very fine grained mylonitic texture. I got myself a small sample and kept on driving towards my destination.
I read online about a museum there called Dynamic Earth and that became my primary target and I drove straight to it after arriving here. There were some interesting displays and an underground tour but a geo like me does not really care about those basic stuff and the reason I went there was not this at all. I wanted to know about the location where I could find shatter cones and the guys in the museum knew the closest location. If you are reading this and do not know about shatter cones, here is a link and some pictures to help you out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatter_cone and most of you might know that Sudbury saw a meteorite impact almost 1.8 billion years ago.
 |
| Dynamic Earth building |
 |
| Shatter cone |
 |
| Shatter cone |
 |
| Shatter cone |
As soon as the museum part was done, I went straight to hunt for some shatter cones. I was totally amazed on when I saw absolutely beautiful specimens right along the road cuts. Some of them are too huge to break for my own collection, so had to take pictures. I broke off some small ones and loaded my Jeep with shatter cones. Another mission accomplished for me and next stop is Ottawa.
No comments:
Post a Comment