My family has been exploring geologically significant places on the earth - well New England mostly - with our GPS unit and listings on Geocaching.com for the past couple of years. The website has educational information about each EarthCache location and GPS coordinates to get there.
The GSA’s explanation on its website, EarthCache.org, explains its approach to educating the general public about the geosciences with Geocaching.com.
“People who want to visit Earthcaches can gather information about a site and what they will experience there through educational notes provided. The notes are written so that an upper-middle school student can understand the science concepts.”
When a tween can grasp the concept of a glacial erratic, basalt deposit, conglomerate quartzite, glacial striation and waterfall formation because of a game she played, you can be assured it’s a novice-friendly way to learn about earth science.
ALL ABOUT GLACIERS
One of our first EarthCache adventures was to find a glacial erratic near Conway, NH.. That is geologist vernacular for a large boulder sitting in a place where you’d never expect to find it. The (basic) geological explanation for this piece of misplaced rock is that it was transported thousands of miles from it’s original home by a glacier during the last ice age. The glacier melted so the rock stopped moving.
Upon finding the “largest known glacial erratic in New England” according to the listing, we had to make a post on the website to prove we’d found the location. (You don’t have to post online unless you want to participate in the EarthCache Masters program, which I’ll explain about more in a bit). Our post included the estimated weight of the erratic (on a nearby kiosk) as well as a couple of photos of my girls’ “trick” photography. They used various camera angles to make it look like they were jumping off and/or lifting up the large boulder. Needless to say this geological discovery was a whole lot of fun in a variety of ways for the kids. And now during hikes the kids point out other erratics. They really are all over the place in Maine.
On a hiking adventure at Camden Hills State Park we learned about glacial striations. These grooves are – in basic terms - scratches cut into the bedrock from a large glacier that passed over it during the last ice age. The striations on Mount Megunticook were easy to spot because the EarthCache listing explained that we needed to look for “straight, parallel grooves” once we arrived at the coordinates posted.
Acadia National Park has an EarthCache program that takes visitors to six unique park locations. It’s part treasure hunt, part brain-teaser because we had to find a clue at the first location to get the coordinates to the next location, and so on. Several of these locations did not have kiosks and are likely overlooked by visitors. In Acadia’s program we found a couple of interesting glacial erratics and learned how fjords are formed. We also went on a hike to learn about Mount Desert Island’s sea level before the last ice age changed it. There is nothing like climbing a mountain and finding a landmark to demonstrate to a child how significant the change in sea level is now (or an adult for that matter).
WATERFALL DISCOVERIES EXCITING
The White Mountains National Forest in New Hampshire has quite a few EarthCache listings as well, most created by laypeople, not park rangers. Since my girls really enjoy waterfalls, we decided to explore several in that national forest.
The Glen Ellis Falls in Jackson near Tuckerman’s Ravine is a short hike from the road and is a beautiful example of a cascading waterfall. The EarthCache listing included a great graphic of different waterfall shapes – block, plunge, tier, punch bowl, etc. – that we printed out and brought along on our adventure. The girls identified the falls shape and speculated about the shapes of other falls we’ve found while hiking.
Our next waterfall EarthCache was the Sabbaday Falls off the Kancamagus Highway. That waterfall was very different from Glen Ellis and the girls declared on the way home they wanted to find more waterfalls and didn’t care if they were EarthCache listings or not.THE MASTERS PROGRAM
Since the girls like earning patches and pins in various youth programs, they have been motivated to work on the EarthCache Masters Program. This is the GSA’s way to encourage goal-oriented types (children and adults) to learn about geology. There are four pin levels – from Bronze to Platinum. For people to earn their Silver (second) pin, they need to research and post their own EarthCache listing. We thought about this for a while before settling on Mount Apatite. It was a location we’ve enjoyed hiking and mining over the years and can easily identify several different types of rocks and minerals at the mines there. If you do a key word search on EarthCache.org for “Gem Trackers” you’ll find a family-friendly listing explaining the area and the kinds of gems you can find there along with links to the Maine Geological Survey that has even more information.
My family has been EarthCaching for a couple of years and is getting close to our Gold level pin. That level has required us to find 12 EarthCaches in four states. While on a couple of out-of-town trips we made time to visit an EarthCache. We found actual dinosaur footprints in western Massachusetts and learned about how a chain of lakes was formed at a state park in central Florida.I admit that if you asked me about my earth science class in high school it’s unlikely I would have told you it was enjoyable. But I have a feeling it ranks pretty high on the fun 'o meter with my girls right now.
Originally published in Raising Maine Magazine, October 2010 edition
No comments:
Post a Comment