A Strange Sort of Spring, Part 2: Diabase Outcrop on the Downeast Coast | Quoddy Head State Park, Maine, USA
If you think this was another one of my late-twentieth-century Ektachrome Moments, you might be right. I can't remember what slide film I used.
What I do remember was the sight of about 5 in (13 cm) of snow on the ground at this spectacular site, the easternmost scrap of mainland US, more than four weeks after the Spring Equinox. I'd returned to Quoddy Head to take nice vernal photos for my Plant Explorer's Guide to New England, and instead I wandered into the set of Nanook of the North.
But after I'd fetched my snow goggles, parka, and dog team I realized I'd been given a chance to see Maine's rugged Downeast coast the way it is when all the tourists are gone. Except for the lighthouse crew, I had the place completely to myself.
What stood out for obvious reasons were not the individual species of the park's raised bog or intertidal zone, but the shoreline outcrops and the snow-mantled masses of White Spruce (Picea glauca) behind them. In a world of snow it's the larger things that matter.
In this shot, the emphasis is on the bedrock. It's dark, Silurian-period diabase (or, if you're a geologist outside the US, dolerite). It was emplaced in what various recent authors have interpreted as the eastern margin of Ganderia, the microcontinent that docked with this part of Laurentia (ancestral North America) before the arrival of Avalonia.
Intermediate in texture between coarse-grained gabbro (a mafic intrusive) and fine-grained basalt (a mafic extrusive), diabase generally solidifies underground, but not far from the surface.
Also visible beyond the rocky shore is the mouth of the Bay of Fundy and, on the faint horizon, the cliffs of Canada's Grand Manan Island.
To see my other photos and descriptions in this Quoddy Head series, visit my Strange Sort of Spring album.
A Strange Sort of Spring, Part 2: Diabase Outcrop on the Downeast Coast | Quoddy Head State Park, Maine, USA
If you think this was another one of my late-twentieth-century Ektachrome Moments, you might be right. I can't remember what slide film I used.
What I do remember was the sight of about 5 in (13 cm) of snow on the ground at this spectacular site, the easternmost scrap of mainland US, more than four weeks after the Spring Equinox. I'd returned to Quoddy Head to take nice vernal photos for my Plant Explorer's Guide to New England, and instead I wandered into the set of Nanook of the North.
But after I'd fetched my snow goggles, parka, and dog team I realized I'd been given a chance to see Maine's rugged Downeast coast the way it is when all the tourists are gone. Except for the lighthouse crew, I had the place completely to myself.
What stood out for obvious reasons were not the individual species of the park's raised bog or intertidal zone, but the shoreline outcrops and the snow-mantled masses of White Spruce (Picea glauca) behind them. In a world of snow it's the larger things that matter.
In this shot, the emphasis is on the bedrock. It's dark, Silurian-period diabase (or, if you're a geologist outside the US, dolerite). It was emplaced in what various recent authors have interpreted as the eastern margin of Ganderia, the microcontinent that docked with this part of Laurentia (ancestral North America) before the arrival of Avalonia.
Intermediate in texture between coarse-grained gabbro (a mafic intrusive) and fine-grained basalt (a mafic extrusive), diabase generally solidifies underground, but not far from the surface.
Also visible beyond the rocky shore is the mouth of the Bay of Fundy and, on the faint horizon, the cliffs of Canada's Grand Manan Island.
To see my other photos and descriptions in this Quoddy Head series, visit my Strange Sort of Spring album.