Oh Canada....

The Canada Act of 1982 was was signed by Queen Elizabeth II on April 17, 1982, and ended all remaining dependence of Canada on the United Kingdom.

Our Father's Day Excursion

We went camping in The Islands this past weekend, about 5 miles from the Canadian border. We went to Isle La Motte and explored part of The Chazy Formation. The pictures are ours but the text comes from Wikipedia.

The Chazy Reef Formation is a mid-Ordovician limestone deposit that consists of some of the oldest reef systems built by a community of organisms. The reef structure was formed largely by bryozoans, but corals made an early appearance, as did the first stromatoporoids.

The formation is named for the small town of Chazy, New York, where the reef was first studied. The reef extends from Tennessee to Quebec, but its most easily studied outcropping is at Goodsell Ridge, Isle La Motte, the northernmost island in Lake Champlain; there, a gentle uplift has tilted the sediments: the bedding planes now dip slightly to the north, revealing sequences of horizons in exposed rock. The black limestone of Isle La Motte takes a polish, revealing the white markings of embedded fossil shells, notably the spirals formed by sliced gastropod shells.

Rock of the Chazy Formation was quarried from the nineteenth century at the Fisk Quarry, Isle La Motte, the oldest quarry in Vermont.

The system formed in warm tropical waters of the Iapetus Ocean, in low latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. The site was in shallow waters of a continental shelf: the continental craton of Laurentia lay to the west, beyond the lagoon system that formed behind the protective reef. The time was some 480-450 million years ago, at a period when global paleoclimate was so warm that the planet was all but ice-free. Atmospheric carbon dioxide was fourteen to sixteen times more plentiful than it is today.

The Chazy Reef Formation, which built up vertically from a muddy base catching fine dark silt as it grew, began as mounds that stabilized a muddy bottom, then built up into the water column to such an extent that the connected mounds modified their surrounding environment. As the reef aged, it began to offer an increasing variety of ecological niches, which fostered the first rich local biodiversity that has characterized all reef systems ever since. One dominant reef-building organism took the place of another, in a slowly evolving faunal succession.

Some Sox Thoughts From Tony Massarotti

Time for a baseball post!

The Joy of Sox (I am sorry to say I just "got" the title this morning!) summed up Tony Massarotti's most recent Boston Globe chat thusly: Mark Teixeira will be playing first base for the 2009 Red Sox (with Kevin Youklis returning to third), we'll be stuck with Julio Lugo (or at least stuck with his contract), the Papi noise is just that, the Sox will make a deal for either Ranger catcher Taylor Teagarden or Jarrod Saltalamacchia, and Justin Masterson will stay in the bullpen.

And he mentioned Manny might fill the hole the Phillies have with Pat the Bat leaving town...

Breaking News....

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government is on track for re-election after polls close, Canadian media project.