The Canadian Shield Clearing EarthCache
The Canadian Shield Clearing
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A piece of Muskoka in the city!
In the heart of Yorkville, you will find a park that has been built to resemble the Canadian landscape. You do not need to travel far to experience different natural areas of Canada, including a marsh, a meadow, and prairie wildflowers.
At the posted coordinates, you will find a granitoid specimen from the Canadian Shield which is over 1 billion years old and weighs approximately 650 tonnes. Rocks of this type were crystallized from a molten magma underneath the surface of the Earth’s crust and took a long time to cool. High temperatures and pressure cooked the granitoid, causing distinct light and dark bands. Granite/gneiss such as this is ubiquitous in Muskoka, but not in downtown Toronto, so in the early 1990’s, this rock was imported from Northeast of Gravenhurst on 20 flatbed trucks – all 135 pieces of this rock puzzle were reassembled to create this distinctive, yet foreign, geological feature in Yorkville.
To log a find on this Earthcache:
1] OPTIONAL: Upload a photo of yourself and your GPS at the rock to your “Found It” log.
2] This is one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in Toronto! Measure the perimeter of the rock and estimate the area (in square metres) upon which it sits. Email your answer to Willipan.
3] Using the formula Volume = Mass/Density, estimate the volume in cubic metres that this rock occupies and email the answer to Willipan. You will have to research to find the approximate density of granite (it varies a bit due to specific composition in different samples)...Make sure that all of your units are consistent (kg for mass, cubic metres for volume, and kg per cubic metre for density).
Additional Hints
(No hints available.)