2016/08 Newf'land trip - Joggins Cliff |
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After our failure to get to the cliffs at Newfoundland’s Mistaken Point, I‘d promised Sandie we’d go to another cliff of fossils, as I remembered reading about Joggins on our ’97 trip. Joggins is on Chigneto Bay on the other side of Parrsboro and there’s no obvious direct route; we went on gravel roads and through a game sanctuary.
We found the museum on top of a long line of cliffs. The cliffs cut through the geological layers, many of them coal seams. The coal had been mined for centuries, even though it’s poor quality, smelly stuff. And that’s where the fossils are, mostly plants from the Coal or Carboniferous Age, but a few insects and reptiles. No dinosaurs; they hadn’t evolved yet. The exciting part for paleontologists is that these fossils are in situ where they grew so each layer gives a snapshot of what the forest was like at that time. The Coal Age was a time of much oxygen in the air, bad because of the fires it caused, but good for insects which could grow much bigger; dragonflies the size of eagles.
We took the guided tour down the steps and onto the beach. The coal beds have a thirty degree tilt. The ranger showed us fossils still embedded in the cliffs, some obviously tree trunks and stumps, others showing the mold of where they’d been Chigneto Bay is part of the Bay of Fundy and the extreme tides scour the cliffs exposing more fossils every day. Down on the beach there were fossils everywhere, bits of trees, bark, ferns, twigs.
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Joggins fossil cliffs |
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Obviously the law frowns on the collection of souvenirs.The beach is also a site for industrial archeologists. We could clearly see where the jetties had been when coal was loaded onto barges there. The cliffs were dotted with the remains of pit props used to shore up the mine workings.
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