Come From Away to Come Home : The Galapagos of Geology

Gros Morne park is incredibly important to our collective understanding of how the earth became the way it is now, physically. It is to geology what the Galapagos is to biology and I'm not the one who first said that.

It is the site where new discoveries, primarily by two young men, Robert Stevens and Harold Williams, changed scientific reasoning, (not without pushback of course) based on fossils and stone formations found rarely anywhere else, and here there are several phenomena all in one place. Plate tectonics, it turns out, rules.

First, you have the Tablelands, which looks like you are suddenly on Mars. In fact NASA scientists have come here to study the rocks and their emissions, as they seem to contain the same complex metal components as those on Mars.

The iron content makes it seem red in colour, but there are other minerals, and it is so nutrient-poor that few plants and creatures can survive in it, although there are tiny alpine plants with 4 foot taproots to reach water, and others that trap insects, all of which have travelled here via errant seeds. Even the gravel brought in for the trail contained seeds that have somehow taken hold and evolved into a new form of what they normally would be. The water that runs through the Tablelands is clear and dense.

But the really big deal is that the Tablelands is actually a piece of the Earth's mantle, here on top of the crust. It formed about 500 million years old when continents collided to form one super-continent, Pangea. It's top would have been the bottom of what is now Africa. It's very existence proves plate tectonics are real.

Another part of the park is a wonderful steep trail called Green Gardens, which highlights volcanic activity. Volcanic rock, as opposed to the Tablelands' peridotite is very nutrient-rich, and these amazing grassy meadows swoop down to cliffs high about the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

hiking down to the sea in the distance

at the sea, long meadows

hiking back up - note the stones to allow runoff
to cross the path without impacting the path,
found on almost every trail

I can see our car from here!
Talk about a contrast between the start and end

These two geological wonders are only about 10 minutes apart!

But wait, there's more.

Green Point is a fairly small cliff-face, the top of which is grass and the bottom of which is the beach. Walking down to and along the beach you can see the most incredible series of rock layers on their ends, full of fossils. These were the bottom of the ocean 500 million years ago, then thrust up and squeezed vertically. The fossils are right at the boundary of Cambrian and Ordovician (I had to look that last one up!).

It is eroding, and even while we were there bits of rocks tumbled down from the top. Mind you, it was also so windy that day that it was hard to stand upright, so little rocks would have found an ally to dislodgement.

In other parts of Newfoundland these thin layers are easily crushed for gravel and other uses, so it's wonderful there is some here in the park that can be preserved.

I took a bazillion photos - here are a few (forgive me if I nerd out a bit here):

trying to smile in the high velocity winds

And then there is Western Brook Pond, which is an inland, fresh water fjord. It was formed by a glacier, and would have ended at the ocean's edge, but as the glacier melted after the last ice age (about 10,000 years ago), the weight of the ice pressing down would have diminished, the land raised up and so the fjord is now about 3 kilometres away from the sea.

You can walk to the fjord and board a boat that takes you right to the end of the fjord, The steep sides still had snow, but also waterfalls and crevasses. The sides are so straight and so deep, the boat could get within a few feet of the cliffs.

All these mountains, called the Long Range Mountains, form the top end of the Appalachian chain.