This morning (April 17) my wife and I saw a very vocal pair (M-F) of
red-bellied woodpecker fussing about a fresh hole in a deciduous
tree, 20-25 feet off the ground, on the north side of CR 12 halfway
between Inverary (Perth Road, CR 10) and Sunbury (CR11). They were
in a linear stand of deciduous trees 40 feet back from the road,
above a superb exposure of the Precambrian/Paleozoic angular
unconformity, in a rock cut visible on both sides of the road
extending EW about 150 feet.
Take the Perth Road (Division Street, CR10) north from Kingston and
turn right on CR12 just south of Inverary and look for the long
outcrop just past the north end of Collins Lake, about 2 km east of
the turnoff from CR10. The hole in question is nearly directly
opposite the entrance to a waterfront home on the south side of CR12.
More on the geology, for those interested:
The overlaying 450-470 million year old Paleozoic sedimentary rock is
a thickly- and horizontally-bedded greenish medium to coarsely
grained calcareous wacke (dirty limey sandstone) (Shadow Lake
Formation?) and the underlaying 1 billion-year-old Precambrian rock
is a slightly weathered gneiss with a prominent fabric dipping W
about 40 degrees. No quartz-pebble conglomerate is developed along
the contact, as it is farther south and west in the Thousand Islands
region. The contact is quite sharp and distinguishable, in contrast
to other exposures of this unconformity, with no visible regolith
preserved on the buried Precambrian surface. In places the actual
former late-Cambrian or early-Ordovician earth surface (the eroded
top of the Grenville gneiss) is exposed. The gap in time represented
by the unconformity is nearly half a billion years!
Well worth the visit, for the RBWO or the rocks.
Geof Burbidge
Chelsea, Quebec
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