rocks rocks rocks, my love affair with rocks

[solarbird]

First: I got the CD orders shipped this afternoon! So if you’re waiting for those, you should have email with dates. ^_^

Okay, now, to the rocks. I’m not a geologist, and being all Fire Nation Asshole, not much of an earth-bender sort, but the south coast of Vancouver Island will turn anybody into a geologist.

We actually discovered this kind of by accident. Trans-Canada Highway 1, one of the longer highways on the planet, starts in Victoria. It heads north up the island, then ferries over to the mainland, then goes back to BC and makes its way east eventually via bridge and ferries and such alllll the way out to St. John’s, Newfoundland. And I knew there was a marker monument at the road’s start, so we went to see that.

So on Sunday after the symphony show, we went to High Tea:

Anna at High Tea

And before going to play at Norway House – which I did later that evening – we went to see Mile 0. On the way there, we found this:

Comfy Cement Mattress Bench is Not Actually Comfy

Now, Mile 0 is obviously pre-metric, which is kind of hilarious, since everything else is metric. But more hilariously, TC-1 gets really tiny on the way to the end. In town, it’s a large city street – like Aurora, only not as big and far better controlled – and at the end, it’s basically a park access road.

That’s from the sidewalk. The only car you see is parked.

And after wandering through the very nice Beacon Hill Park, we got to Mile 0 and Terry Fox’s statue.

Mile Zero

Terry Fox

And while taking pictures, we saw someone run somebody else off the seashore road. We were already going to explore that a bit anyway, since it’s the meeting really of the Salish Sea and the Pacific Ocean, but the near-accident pointed us to a stairwell down the cliff, where we found this insanity.

Really?

What.

I mean seriously, what.

See how all those pretty much unlike rocks are crammed up against and into each other and shit? That is madness. Welcome to the subduction zone. According to Fishy, Vancouver Island was actually – many millions of years ago – torn off from Alaska as the Alaskan plate moved north. So it’s violent and different and merged and mixed up in all sorts of crazy ways. To wit:

Go Home Rocks, You Are Drunk

And some places it just looks like a volcano went off. Which… arguably it has. Fairly recently. But that’s not what made these rocks. All these rocks are dozens of millions of years old.

Not a Lahar, Not Lava Either

I’m telling you, the Doctor Who episodes you could film here would be epic.

We hiked around for – I don’t know, really, I’m bad at time. A couple of hours, climbing up and down things. As everywhere in Cascadia, they have beach logs, one of which apparently belongs to a giant robot.

VOLTRON

(Larger versions of all these are on my Flickr photostream.)

After that we hiked on back to the hotel, from which we headed north to the show. And I’ll post about those bits tomorrow, while the water heater is being replaced. My first stage experience in four and a half months! How did it go? Find out tomorrow. ^_^

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Comments

[stickmaker]

Well, I see a silicon-based hand with a ring on it; a pre-human skull; a patch of fossilized bacteria mutated in a spaceship explosion...

SCIENCE!

[solarbird]

I see GEOLOGY!

[oh6]

Northern Ontario is something like this, except that there's little or no topography since it's much older.

[solarbird]

Oceanic erosion vs. freeeze/thaw. I wonder which breaks things down more quickly?

[maellenkleth]

Short version of the story from someone who's extensively published on the geology and tectonics of northern Cascadia ^_^ (there, that's just this side of self-outing, isn't it?)

The basement rocks (the 'turtle' rocks, if you like) of Western Alaska are derived mainly from crust that was rifted-off of the central coast of California. Further on in time, and thus lagging somewhat to the southward, the turtle rocks of Vancouver Island and about half of Haida Gwa'ii were rifted-off from northern Mexico. These two crustal chunks smacked into each other, and then shortly thereafter both of them smacked into the nasty squashed bugs (the previously-accreted terrane fragments) that were already stuck to the western edge of the old-old-old North American crust.

Just for fun, I tried matching the internal stratigraphy of some marine rocks from near Nanaimo (definitely part of Cascadia, deposited well after all these crustal fragments had their multi-turtle collision!) with the internal stratigraphy of some identically-aged marine rocks from the Eel River Basin of Northern California. Guess what, it works! (It even works all the way down to matching the two anomalously gold-rich sandstone zones within those sections).

Science is fun.

p.s. I'm saving the gold claims for my retirement hobby. ^_^

q.t. Was really fun to have you and Anna as lair-guests. Come again, as you will!

r.u. Is not an abbreviation in this series, but it should be.

s.v. This hypothesis is not my original idea. Look up 'Baja British Columbia Hypothesis'. People have been taking swings at each other (both yea! and nay! camps) for the past 25 years. Personally, I am delighted that the palaeomagnetic evidence gloriously contradicts the palaeontolgic evidence. Science is **indeed** fun.

[solarbird]

hee hobby mining