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Glacial Outcrop At Scarborough, Toronto


JUAN EMMANUEL

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This week I got my monthly TTC Monthly Metropass for the first time ever and so with this card in my wallet I was excited that I had unlimited freedom to use the transit to go wherever I want in the city of Toronto for the whole September. Yesterday, while travelling with my card in wallet in Scarborough after finishing an assessment, I came across a creek right at Progress Drive and went down to explore it, in hopes of coming across the Whitby formation. I had seen bits of information regarding outcrops of the Whitby in Scarborough on the net, and I took this opportunity to explore as I live far away from Scarborough. I went down on a driveway I found behind a building and descended below to the bottom. From the edge of the creek I saw no exposures of the Whitby formation but instead saw outcrops of sand, a bit similar to what I saw at the Don Valley Brickworks. Some of the outcrops' bottom were ridden with overgrowth, so I chose the one that had the least, which was this one.

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The highest point of this outcrop would be around three storeys high and streches for several metres. There's also a substantial sediment material that has fallen off at the bottom and the vegetation on the bottom isn't as thick.

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East flank.

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West flank.

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Bottom of the outcrop.

This sediment has rocks on it. This should be a glacial deposit.

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Sandy sediment with no rocks in it. I found some fossil wood, mostly driftwood and a tree bark, in this sandy part. Some of the wood crumbled quite easily into finer parts when I examined them.

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Edited by JUAN EMMANUEL
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Some of the fossil wood I found. I only decided to take home just a few because my parents are not rock fans and are not particularly pleased when they see their son carry home rocks. No vertebrates, though I did found some fossil snails. This one appears to be a Valvata snail shell.

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Edited by JUAN EMMANUEL
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Here are the wood fossils that I brought home.

Top and bottom of the fossil driftwood.

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Some other smaller driftwood I picked out from the sand.

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A fossil bark.

Front.

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Back.

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Up close of front side.

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The creek were I came upon this outcrop is very thin and is developed over by boulders but luckily the exposures (there were others as well but the bottoms were covered thickly by plants) were spared from the bulldozing. The creek seems almost non-existant from where I was.

I also tried to search online the name of the creek but came to nothing. From using Google Maps apparently the creek is part of the Highland Creek system and is a tributary that feeds itself into the West Highland Creek.

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Edited by JUAN EMMANUEL
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Im going to spend some time trying to figure out what formation this is. The outcrop has interbedding of different colourwd sands. West flank has a greyish white clour while the east had a creamy white to it. In the middle most of the sand that has fallen into heap appears to be a sort of glacial deposit. What bugs me is that this could be the Scarborough formation but I've never red of any glacial deposit occuring in that formation but with the fossil wood that I found it pretty much fots the description of what can be found there. For next time I wanna go look for vertebrate fossils in these formations.

Edited by JUAN EMMANUEL
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That's awesome! :) Thanks for sharing. I would love to search areas where glaciers had retreated. What a treat! :)

"Direct observation of the testimony of the earth ... is a matter of the laboratory, of the field naturalist, of indefatigable digging among the ancient archives of the earth's history."

— Henry Fairfield Osborn

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