Rock wall at Lunenburg

You don’t have to be that adventurous to find out about the geology in a given area. You can discover a lot by exploring the roadsides and urban environments. Very often the local rocks are used for buildings and sea defences; or quarries and cuttings can be seen from the car as you travel along the highway.

In Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, most of the buildings in the old part of town are wooden. However, the odd garden boundary wall is made of stone, using the local rock type. The photographs in this post, though taken on a very dull wet day, show a wall of rocks that are particularly colourful with rusty stainings from the iron minerals they contain; and they also display patterns of the thin layers or beds in which the fine sediments were laid down. The rocks are most likely to belong to the Halifax Formation, dating from the late Cambrian to middle Ordovician Periods, i.e. 499 – 470 million years ago. The original deposits of sedimentary rock have undergone metamorphosis and been converted into slates and metasandstones.