Exploring Manitoulin
To find comparisons that will register with the imagination and accommodate the extreme disproportions of geological time is no easy task.
However, imagine if you will, a walk from Little Current to the Bidwell Road, about 20 kilometres. If we let this distance represent all the time since the formation of the universe (Big Bang approx. 15,000 million years ago), every step would represent 400,000 years. Our earth and sun would come into existence almost 2/3 of the way through our walk. Half a kilometer away from the Bidwell, the age of dinosaurs begins and they become extinct about 100 meters from the turnoff. The whole human history from the time of Christ to the present would be the last 3 millimeters of highway before we finish our walk.
If time on such a grand scale stuns us momentarily, we have only to look at Manitoulin Island and vicinity to see, touch, and walk upon the stones that witnessed the ancient seas and sunsets.
“And God said, let the waters under heaven and earth be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so” Genesis 1.9
Half a kilometer away from the Bidwell, the age of dinosaurs begins and they become extinct about 100 meters from the turnoff.
There was no oxygen in the atmosphere, no life on land and only the most primitive Cyano-bacteria forming in the tidal pools around 2300-2100 million years ago. During this time a thick sequence of sedimentary rock was deposited in the Sudbury-Manitoulin area. Mountain building (tectonic activity) deformed and metamorphosed (changed) these rocks. Erosion gradually wore down the huge mountains. The LaCloche Mountains of Willisville and Killarney are what remain of this ancient chain.
Between 480 and 410 million years ago, these same mountains were islands in a shallow, warm subtropical sea that covered much of North America and Manitoulin Island.
By this time, the seas teemed with life. Early types of shellfish and seaweed were the dominant species, along with the trilobite, the forerunner of today’s horseshoe crab. Along with these organisms, the first reef corals were establishing colonies such as the formations at Fossil Hill south of Manitowaning. Together these creatures lived and died, their bodies building up the layer upon layer of slimy ooze that became beautiful Manitoulin Island.
Between 480 and 410 million years ago, these same mountains were islands in a shallow, warm subtropical sea that covered much of North America and Manitoulin Island.
Thus, the abundant limestone that a visitor sees virtually everywhere was deposited on the bottom of this ancient sea. Abundant fossils of the earliest marine life can be seen in the rock cuts just before and after the bridge entering Little Current. The round discolourations (on average the size of baseballs) in these rocks are fossilized sponges and the fossils that people often mistake for spinal columns, similar to those found in canned salmon, are actually the stalks of crinoids, a forerunner of todays seaweeds.
Each year, hundreds of geology students from all over North America come to marvel at the fossil formations that can be found in this area. One reason for this pilgrimage is that unlike sedimentary rock of this age found in other areas, Manitoulin’s Ordivician and Silurian sediments have not undergone any extensive deformations that would otherwise destroy the fossils. A first time visitor will be surprised to learn that the numerous large boulders one can see on the flats just outside of Little Current on the way to Espanola were deposited by mile and a half high glaciers which covered this area as little as 8,000 years ago.
A first time visitor will be surprised to learn that the numerous large boulders one can see on the flats just outside of Little Current on the way to Espanola were deposited by mile and a half high glaciers which covered this area as little as 8,000 years ago.
Shortly after, the glaciers began to rapidly recede. This area became sub-artic in climate and with the wooly mammoths that roamed the marginal barren lands came early Paleolithic hunters. In quarries near Sheguiandah the flint chips that remained after making stone tools are scattered everywhere.
The area has a truly amazing history.