If your usual Sea Point walk takes you towards Queen’s Beach, look down at the rocks next time. Between the beach and Saunders’ Rocks, pale granite meets bands of darker rock along a stretch of shoreline that caught Charles Darwin’s attention in 1836. It’s now one of three South African sites recognised for what they reveal about Earth’s history.
Saunders’ Rocks Beach, with Lion’s Head on the left / Chris Rycroft / Wikimedia Commons
As Good Things Guy reports, the Sea Point Contact joins the Nhlazatse rock section in KwaZulu-Natal and Waterloo Farm near Makhanda in the latest round of IUGS Geological Heritage Sites. The International Union of Geological Sciences announced 100 additions on 6 November, bringing the number of recognised sites in South Africa to six.
Where two kinds of rock meet in Sea Point
There’s a reason geologists pay attention to the stretch between Queen’s Beach and Saunders’ Rocks. Here, molten rock pushed into older layers and cooled into granite. You can still see where the two meet, with bands and fragments of darker rock caught up in the paler granite. It’s the sort of detail you can walk past for years, especially when your eyes are on the sea.
A river gorge holds traces of early life
In KwaZulu-Natal’s Wit Mfolozi River Gorge, sandstone preserves traces of communities of microbes that once lived on a tidal flat about 2.9 billion years ago. The microbes grew in mats across the sand, leaving patterns that are still visible in the rock. By looking at how those patterns change from one layer to the next, researchers found evidence that the ancient coastline passed through three different climate zones.
An Eastern Cape fossil site with a polar past
Fossils from Waterloo Farm near Makhanda tell a story that’s hard to picture from the Eastern Cape today. Around 360 million years ago, this part of the world lay within the Antarctic Circle. Researchers found fossils of two species of early four-limbed vertebrates at the site, showing that these animals lived in polar regions at a time when the fossil evidence had pointed to the tropics.
The three sites join the Vredefort Dome, the Barberton Greenstone Belt and the Kalahari Manganese Field on the global list. And if you’re in Cape Town, you can start with a walk you might already know. Give yourself a few extra minutes near Queen’s Beach and see if you can spot where those two kinds of rock meet.
Source (Good Things Guy)
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