Today we are up bright and early as we leave St. John's, NL and travel South on the Avalon Peninsula. We have a quick breakfast at the place with the mermaid in the logo and then picking up Rt-10 to follow the east coast of the peninsula to Portugal Cove South to the Mistaken Point UNESCO World Heritage Site. Mistaken Point because sailors repeatably mistaking it for Cape Race in foggy weather and turn North, expecting to find Cape Race Harbour, instead hitting rocks and leading to shipwreck. There have been more than 50 shipwrecks in this area.
But that is not the reason we have come to Mistaken Point, but to see the 565 million year old fossil sites. Those are the oldest, large, complex life forms found anywhere on Earth. Known to scientist as the 'Ediacara biota', these creatures lived when all life was still in the sea. The organisms whose fossils now form the Mistaken Point assemblage lived about 565 million years ago on the bottom of a deep ocean, considerably below the depth that waves or light could reach. Those soft bodied creatures lived millions of years before animals developed skeletons, but the imprints of their soft tissues were preserved in place on the muddy sea floor when they were suddenly buried by repeated influxes of volcanic ash-rich sediment. The volcanic ash layers contain crystals of the mineral zircon, which enable geologists to accurately date them.
We then continued from the fossil site to Cape Race and its lighthouse. Besides the fact that this lighthouse has one of the world's largest hyperradiant Fresnel lens made by Chance Brothers in England (only 33 were made, only 12 are still in operation, only 1 in Canada) and floating on 7 gallons of mercury, it is also the first or the last lighthouse depending of the direction of travel sailors will see when crossing the Atlantic between Europe and North America. Cape Race also played a critical role on April 14, 1912 when the Marconi wireless station received the distress signal from the RMS Titanic. From there the signal was relayed to other ships and the world, and Cape Race became the central point for communication and rescue efforts. The Marconi station is today a 'wireless interpretation center', but was unfortunately still closed for the season.
After so much knowledge gain we return to Rt-10 and go North on the western side of the peninsula, which in my opinion is one of the most beautiful coastal sections of Newfoundland. It reminds us very much to the Western Cape region in South Africa, perhaps that's where the liking comes from. In St. Catherine's, NL we pick up Rt-91 and cross over to Placentia, NL and call it the day.
"Sometime in the first billion years, life appeared on the earth's surface. Slowly, the fossil record indicates, living organisms climbed the ladder simple to more advanced forms." - Robert Jastrow, American astronomer and planetary physicist, 1925-2008
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