LISTEN TO THE SILENCE - GROS MORNE NATIONAL PARK

Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada

Author and Photographer: NICOLA GORDON,
Publication Date: July 24, 2016

It all started years ago when I stepped out of a crowded tour bus onto the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Diverging tectonic plates cut geologically tumultuous Iceland down the middle.

At Þingvellir world UNESCO site the result is towering cliffs and ever-widening crevices. The result on my companions was silence - tour-bus chatter stopped and fifty tourists just breathed in the magic of this place. And in those silent moments and that rugged wilderness my fascination with geology began.

Now I walk the misty mountains of Gros Morne world UNESCO site in Newfoundland. My guide is Kevin Barnes - Western region Vice Chief of the Mi’kmaq First Nation Band. He’s a guy who knows a lot about the wilderness, and he loves to share.

“What’s the first thing you noticed as you drove down the valley?”, he asks.

“On one side the mountains are green and lush, and on the other just barren peaks”. The answer was right there in front of me.

So Kevin tells the story of the mountains. Five hundred million years ago a vast ocean began to close. One oceanic plate plunged down and magma flowed up to expose Earth’s mantle beneath the waves. With another twenty-five million years of shifting plates, barren reef and nutrient rich ocean floor rose skyward. And everywhere I saw the evidence of this mostly slow-motion tumult. Barren peaks mirror lush green peaks in lock-step down the valley. And the last two million years of repeated glaciation show the classic U-shaped profile dotted with glacial erratics.

We trudge higher. Then pause, and our footsteps echo to silence. The sights and sounds of my world are left behind and the wilderness seems to embrace.

"Now listen to the silence", Kevin says.
And without the passing cars, and my trudging feet the familiar sounds of my world are truly gone. Moments pass. Then my ears attune to the unfamiliar sounds of the wilderness.

Now that history that fascinated me in Iceland is right here. I listen and watch as the land changes in nature’s slow-motion version of real-time. I hear crashing high in the mountains as an avalanche shifts mountaintop to valley. A snow-fed waterfall throws torrents that carve deep crevices in the rock. And meandering rivers carry eroded mountain to the sea. And so these mountains that were created by the millennia continue their never-ending transformation.

And my fascination with geology is well satisfied.

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