After Katahdin Iron Works, we traveled out towards the coast to Acadia National Park, where we stayed on the Schoodic Peninsula at the Schoodic Education and Research Center. Being on the shore, we were able to study the effects both of glacial erosion in the bedrock and of hundreds of meters of sea level change during and since the Pleistocene ice age. There were striations and chatter marks made by rocks embedded in the glaciers grinding across the bedrock. These allowed us to estimate the south-southeast direction of flow of the glacier. At Schoodic Point, we used the principle of cross-cutting relations to construct a relative dating history of a dozen events from granitic magma rising in the crust to basalt cooling to glacial melting to recent sea level rise and erosion.
We took a trip to Mount Desert Island, where we stopped at several places to study the glacial erosion. At Jordan Pond, we saw how the glacier moved over and around The Bubbles (two small mountains with a U-shaped valley in between), causing stoss and lee features on the up-glacier and down-glacier sides of the mountains. The stoss side had abrasion from the grinding glacier and the lee side had steep cliffs where plucking by the glaciers removed giant blocks of stone. The pond itself was formed through the repetitive retreating and advancing of the glacier. That day we also traveled to the top of Cadillac Mountain by van, where the views of Bar Harbor, as well as many of Maine’s islands could be seen.
That evening, we also ate dinner in Bar Harbor (or Bah Habah) and spent some time walking around and enjoying the sights. Because of the low tide at the time we were there, we got to walk out onto the sandbar that leads to Bar Island, which was very cool to walk across, and for skipping rocks too!
The next day, after a midterm exam (yes! a midterm!) we went swimming on Schoodic Peninsula. It was so cold! But the Bay of Fundy, where we are headed next, is going to be even colder! Its very cool to experience each aspect of what we are learning where we are, and I’m excited to find out what we’re learning about next!
