Area of Gros
Morne National Park: 700 sq. miles
(1,813 sq. km.)
Average temperature
(summer): 68 F (20 C)
Average temperature
(winter): 17 F (8 C)
Gros
Morne National Park in Newfoundland
,Canada.[1]
Gros Morne National
Park of Canada was designated
a UNESCO World Heritage Site in
1987. The park is an area of great
natural beauty with a rich variety
of scenery, widlife, and recreational
activities. Visitors can hike
through wild, uninhabited mountains
and camp by the sea. Boat tours
bring visitors under the towering
cliffs of a freshwater fjord carved
out by glaciers.[3]
Gros Morne National Park
is a world heritage site located on
the west coast of Newfoundland. At 1,805
km2 (697 sq mi) , it is the second largest
national park in Atlantic Canada (surpassed
by the Torngat Mountains National Park
Reserve at 9,600 km2/3,700 sq mi).
The park takes its name
from Newfoundland's second-highest mountain
peak (at 2,644 ft/806 m) located within
the park. Its French meaning is "large
mountain standing alone," or more
literally "great sombre."
Gros Morne is a member of the Long Range
Mountains, an outlying range of the
Appalachian Mountains, stretching the
length of the island's west coast. It
is the eroded remnants of a mountain
range formed 1.2 billion years ago.
"The park provides a rare example
of the process of continental drift,
where deep ocean crust and the rocks
of the earth's mantle lie exposed."
The Gros Morne National
Park Reserve was established in 1973.
It wasn't until October 1, 2005 that
the National Parks Act was applied to
the reserve, thereby making it a Canadian
National Park.
The park's rock formations,
made famous by Robert Stevens and Harold
Williams, include oceanic crust and
mantle rock exposed by the obduction
process of plate tectonics, as well
as sedimentary rock formed during the
Ordovician Period, granite from the
Precambrian and igneous rocks from the
Palaeozoic Era.
The many soil associations
mapped in the park reflect the wide
variety of bedrock. The Silver Mountain
soil association, dominant in the northeastern
area, is a very stony sandy loam developed
on glacial till overlying granite, granitic
gneiss and schist. Similar rocks underlie
the St. Paul's Inlet association farther
west. Sedimentary rocks (including some
dolomitic limestone) in the southeastern
sector support the North Lake association
of stony sandy loam. An association
of mostly-shallow loam, the Cox's Cove,
occupies a discontinuous band over shale,
slate, limestone and sandstone near
the coast. The coastal strip north of
Bonne Bay is mostly underlain by the
peaty Gull's Marsh association and the
coarse Sally's Cove association except
for an area of clay (Wood's Island association)
around Rocky Harbour. The stony infertile
soils of the ultramafic tablelands south
of Bonne Bay belong to the Serpentine
Range association
Around 1,200 million years ago, in the
Precambrian era, the ancient core of
what is now eastern North America collided
slowly with another continent to form
a vast mountain range. All that remains
today are the deeply eroded granites
and gneisses of the Long Range mountains.
In late Precambrian time,
the supercontinent began to break apart.
As it split, steep fractures formed
and filled with molten rock from below.
This magma cooled into the diabase dykes
seen in the cliffs of Western Brook
Pond and Ten Mile Pond.
By 570 million years ago the continent
finally rifted apart, and the resulting
basin became an ocean called the Iapetus
Ocean. Some of the rocks of Gros Morne
National Park were part of the continental
margin on the western side of this new
ocean, south of the Equator
Over the next 100 million
years, during the Cambrian and Ordovician
periods, ancient North America and what
is now Gros Morne National Park drifted
northward. Sediment eroding from the
North American continent washed into
the Iapetus Ocean and accumulated offshore
as a broad continental shelf.
The first sediments were sands and silts
deposited in shallow water. These sediments
are now the quartzites that cap Gros
Morne Mountain and directly overlie
the ancient granites and gneisses. Sediment
supply decreased, and carbonate banks
flourished in the shallow tropical waters
as the calcareous remains of snails,
brachiopods, trilobites and algal mats
accumulated. These remains of ancient
organisms form the park's extensive
sequences of limestone and dolomite.
Near the edge of this ancient tropical
shelf, currents caused some sediment
to be deposited into deeper water as
debris flows. This material washed down
the continental slope and formed coarse
sandstone. Occasionally, overloading,
by earthquakes or by storms triggered
submarine landslides. These landslides
toppled thousands of tonnes of limestone
from the edge of the continental shelf
and deposited the rubble on the continental
slope. Eventually this rubble cemented
together to form limestone breccia (a
type of conglomerate) and shales.
The dramatic events that
created the varied bedrock types of
Gros Morne National Park are not the
end of the area's geological story.
Continental collision continued for
100 million years as the Appalachian
Mountains grew. The rocks of the park
were folded, faulted, and uplifted during
the Devonian by widespread movements
in the Earth's crust.
Since the Devonian the rock assemblage
of the park has remained relatively
stable except for erosion, uplift and
some slight shifting along faults. The
last two-million years of repeated glaciation,
deglaciation, and associated sea-level
changes shaped the park scenery that
we see today.[4]
You tube video
Gros Morne National Park of Canada was
designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site
in 1987
