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About 130 million
years ago, a gigantic upheaval in the earth's crust created the
majestic Coast Mountains, the beginning of present-day British
Columbia. Sixty-five million years ago, further movements brought
forth the Rocky Mountains, and 40 million years later, Cascadia, the
Atlantis of the Pacific, sank offshore, leaving Vancouver Island and
the Queen Charlotte Islands above sea level. A mere million years
ago, most of BC was covered with a blanket of ice 2,500m thick,
which slowly began to recede 70,000 years later.
North to south, as
the crow flies, Vancouver's terrain runs from mountains down to
Burrard Inlet and the low rolling slopes of the city centre, and
beyond to the flat fertile delta of the Fraser River, which branches
into two arms to greet the sea. Immediately south of the delta lies
the American border and Washington State.
It all looks fairly
solid, but is actually slowly changing. Vancouverites received a
reminder that the earth is alive in 1980, when Mount St.Helens in
Washington erupted and spewed a film of fine ash over the city. One
of Vancouver's most famous landmarks, Siwash Rock in Stanley Park,
is the uneroded remnant of a small volcano within the city limits,
and black volcanic rock underpins nearby Prospect Point. Volcanic
rock was quarried for road material out of the city highpoint that
today is Queen Elizabeth Park. Mount Garibaldi, a short drive east,
was an active volcano 1,000 years ago. Indian poet Pauline Johnson,
whose ashes were scattered over Siwash Rock, named Lost Lagoon, in
Stanley Park, because it used to vanish at low tide, before it was
closed in by man.
Nature is
continually busy creating, shaping, destroying and displacing,
usually at a pace too gentle for mere mortals to detect. At one time
a thick layer of ice pressed down over the city; its retreat about
10,000 years ago left the vast and visually delightful panorama of
mountains, canyons, fiords, rivers and swamps. Without the weight of
the ice, the land lifted, and layers of marine shells have been
found several hundred meters above sea-level. All Fraser River delta
land west of New Westminster developed after the ice retreated, and
alluvial soils continue to create several meters of new real estate
here every year. At the end of the 19th century, workers extending
Granville Street unearthed ancient tools, weapons and ornaments in
the Marpole Midden, the largest of its kind discovered in North
America to that date. A similar midden in Stanley Park provided so
many seashells, emptied and discarded by hungry native Indian
residents, that park roads were once paved with them.
Constant landslides
on to mountain roads are a regular reminder that geological
processes work without pause. Vancouver has even had several minor
earthquakes. One in 1946 registered 7.3 at the epicenter, which was
fortunately some distance north. But buildings rocked, windows broke
and the big clock on the Vancouver Block stopped. Seismologists say
Vancouver and environs are very likely to feel the impact of "The
Big One", if and when it comes, although no one will mind if it
fails to happen.
Sea
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