Post by 150FromFundy on Mar 29, 2013 13:42:45 GMT -5
It was a Good Friday for rock hounding, so I ventured out of the snow covered woods and headed for the Bay of Fundy. It’s still just a few degrees above freezing, but the sun was out making it almost bearable.
If these photos look familiar, I keep coming back to this place. The spring freeze/thaw cycles ensure that there is always something new spalling off the cliffs this time of year.
This first photo is Cape Sharp as viewed from Partridge Island. This rocky headland is made out of amygdaloidal basalt that resists erosion. The amygdaloids are filled with agate, chalcedony, quartz and a number of zeolites.
This second photo is a sea stack on Partridge Island. The beaches are essentially a rubble pile that is 99.9% basalt. You can see flecks of colour that all warrant a kick and an occasional lick. The coloured pieces are fragments of agate, chalcedony, quartz and zeolites that have eroded out of the cliff faces.
This is a little closer look at the sea stack. You can see the wet line from this morning’s high tide (44 ft). The tide is currently about as low as it can go (1 ft). If any of you have seen “black smokers” on undersea adventure documentaries, this is an extinct “black smoker” that would have once been deep below the ocean as Pangaea was ripped apart and the Atlantic Ocean formed.
Usually malachite and azurite only occur as a thin crust on rocks. This is a thin seam about ¼” thick in the basalt. Still useless, but pretty.
This is a seam of stilbite, a member of the zeolite family. A number of zeolites are commonly found in the amygdaloidal basalt. This one is so common, it was named Nova Scotia’s provincial mineral.
This is another seam of zeolite, possibly stilbite.
Hope you enjoy the photos. I’ll post some of the bucket finds shortly.
Darryl.
If these photos look familiar, I keep coming back to this place. The spring freeze/thaw cycles ensure that there is always something new spalling off the cliffs this time of year.
This first photo is Cape Sharp as viewed from Partridge Island. This rocky headland is made out of amygdaloidal basalt that resists erosion. The amygdaloids are filled with agate, chalcedony, quartz and a number of zeolites.
This second photo is a sea stack on Partridge Island. The beaches are essentially a rubble pile that is 99.9% basalt. You can see flecks of colour that all warrant a kick and an occasional lick. The coloured pieces are fragments of agate, chalcedony, quartz and zeolites that have eroded out of the cliff faces.
This is a little closer look at the sea stack. You can see the wet line from this morning’s high tide (44 ft). The tide is currently about as low as it can go (1 ft). If any of you have seen “black smokers” on undersea adventure documentaries, this is an extinct “black smoker” that would have once been deep below the ocean as Pangaea was ripped apart and the Atlantic Ocean formed.
Usually malachite and azurite only occur as a thin crust on rocks. This is a thin seam about ¼” thick in the basalt. Still useless, but pretty.
This is a seam of stilbite, a member of the zeolite family. A number of zeolites are commonly found in the amygdaloidal basalt. This one is so common, it was named Nova Scotia’s provincial mineral.
This is another seam of zeolite, possibly stilbite.
Hope you enjoy the photos. I’ll post some of the bucket finds shortly.
Darryl.
