With our time in Newfoundland winding down (insert sad face here) we made sure to stop in an area in Gros Morne National Park called The Tablelands. In the summer months there is a fascinating, fun - and free - guided walking tour every day at 10:00am. That’s a bit early for both D and I, but we managed to get there in time - just in time. Guided tours are so much better than going it on your own, I think!
The tour takes you two kilometres along a trail through barren landscape of rusty orange-coloured rocks - rocks that have been pushed up from the earth’s mantle (a layer of rock found deep beneath the earth’s crust) hundreds of millions of years ago. Peridotite is the name of this rock. It is a greenish colour that looks a bit like snake skin, before it changes to rusty orange with oxidization.
The only way I can describe The Tablelands is… otherworldly. I wasn’t surprised to find out that two sci-fi movies have been filmed here, and the area has been used to train astronauts for missions to Mars and the moon. Oh, and this is where geologists were able to definitively prove the theory of Plate Tectonics.
That’s quite an impressive resume for a bunch of old rocks!
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| Peridotite rock from the Earth's mantle |
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