I wonder, how many geoscientists do we have in Glendale? And how many Glendaliens, like me, are not geoscientists, but kind of wish we had a geology friend to walk around with and ask questions of when we see interesting features on the landscape?
When a lot is redeveloped, it can be an interesting opportunity to peer below at the ground beneath our feet, which is usually invisible to us. I stopped to look at a cross section that was visible for a short time before new basements filled the hole dug a few houses up from me last month. Black topsoil, round river rocks, and till.
I remember the first Jane’s Walk that I joined in Glendale and loving hearing about both the lake that the community originally formed around, and the groundwater flow that weaves through our community. Would anyone out there like to tell us more stories of Glendale’s geologic (or archaeologic or biologic or other?) past and present in the pages of the Thumper? Please get in touch. For now, I found a few resources for us:
The Canadian Geoscience Education Network’s Geoscience – Calgary article tells us that the main hills in Calgary are remnants of a much higher plain from one million years ago, that has been largely removed by river erosion with modification by glacial erosion during the Ice Age (https://www.cgenarchive.org/calgary-landscapes.html).
For anyone looking for a serious deep dive, the Alberta Geological Survey published a 57-page study in 1985 on the Surficial Geology of the Calgary Urban Area (https://ags.aer.ca/publications/all-publications/bul-053), and for those of us who like to look and learn, the CBC published an article in 2021 about notable features around Calgary that you will find while roadside touring (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/dale-leckie-geology-rock-formations-1.6123174).
To close out a rock-appreciation article, as a child of the 80s, I’ve gotta give a shout out: how cool is it that Calgary gets to be the new home of Fraggle Rock!? (https://globalnews.ca/news/10320758/season-2-fraggle-rock-calgary/).
Laura Nixon
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