After reading the Underwater power lines to Gabriola? post, Nick Doe sent us this text and photo:
A core from the BC Hydro drilling investigation at Brickyard Beach, August 2010. It comes from about 60 feet down. Gabriola’s bedrock is sedimentary rock (sandstone, shale, and conglomerate), which originated in the estuary of a large river, or rivers, flowing from the Coast Mountains. The mudstone core here has captured the deposit of wisps of silt and clay on the then seabed some distance from the land, and likely several hundred feet below the then surface of the sea. Apart from the science, what’s neat about such pictures I think is that they connect us so directly with events from so long ago. The silty-sandy layers in the middle are the result of the partial collapse of a submarine cliff of sediment that existed at the river mouth, much like the ones at the mouth of the Fraser River today. The collapse took may be what, five minutes, yet here we are looking at the turbulence it caused some 70 to 75 million years later. It would be another ten million years after this event before the many species of dinosaurs living at the time would be wiped out. Time, like space, is deep.
Click on the photo if you’d like to see a larger version.
Tags: Brickyard Beach, drilling, Nick Doe
