r/ecoregions

In a land painted green by the monsoon, three giants shared a single frame.

An Indian Gaur walks and stood in front of the camera, a Wild Water Buffalo rested in the marsh, and a Rhinoceros quietly grazed nearby. Different species, different stories-yet bound by the same wilderness.

Bringing some love from Ohio! On the north side of Kelleys Island is Glacial Grooves State Park. The Wisconsin glacier carved a set of grooves into the exposed Columbus Limestone here that are the largest accessible glacial striations on Earth. The current grooves measure approximately 430 feet long, 35 feet wide, and 15 feet deep. Bit hard to get to since you need to take a ferry, but it's a great feature of our state!

If you want a deeper dive on them (cause this is/r/geology, after all):

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Four hundred million years ago, give or take, this was the floor of a shallow Devonian sea. Silty carbonate ooze accumulated on the seafloor, and over the subsequent eons it lithified into Columbus Limestone: a high-calcium, thin-bedded, much-jointed formation that would eventually become the backbone of the Lake Erie island chain.

The limestone sat there for roughly 399,982,000 years. Then the Laurentide Ice Sheet showed up. At the peak of the Late Wisconsin glaciation, around 18,000 years BP, Kelleys Island was underneath approximately one mile of ice. The island sits on the east flank of the Cincinnati Anticline, part of a cuesta ridge that runs north through the Lake Erie Archipelago; the Columbus Limestone and the underlying Monroe Formation of the Upper Silurian are what give the islands their structure.

The formation mechanism is still debated. Traditional models attribute the grooves to gravel and cobbles embedded in the base of the ice sheet scraping along the bedrock under immense pressure. More recent work from ODNR suggests the grooves may have been carved by sand-charged meltwater flowing at extreme velocity and pressure through subglacial channels. Either way, the bedrock lost the argument.

The grooves are oriented in the direction of glacial movement, and you can read the ice's trajectory in them. Morrison's 1950 economic geography of the island noted that Sweet Valley, the low central depression running east-west through the island's interior, was itself the product of ice scour. Everywhere you look on Kelleys Island, the landscape is a palimpsest of glacial violence. You've got striated pavement on the east shore, enormous erratics scattered across Long Point, and the grooves themselves, running north to south as the world's most aggressive geological drag marks.

Before someone mentions, yes, similar (smaller) grooves exist on Gibraltar Island and West Sister Island (both in Lake Erie, so not THAT Gibraltar). The grooves were designated a National Natural Landmark in 1967 and have been a State Memorial since 1923.

The grooves used to be longer. Considerably longer. They originally extended from their current position north into Lake Erie; the feature was, by historical accounts, vastly more impressive than what survives today. The reason it does not survive is that the Kelley Island Lime and Transport Company, along with earlier operations dating back to 1833, quarried the Columbus Limestone for flux stone, building material, and lime. The Great Lakes stone trade literally started on Kelleys Island; John A. Clemons opened the first quarry and built a dock on the north shore in 1833, and by 1867 the island was shipping 60,852 tons of stone annually. By 1912, the company operated three quarries covering huge swaths of the island, employed 400 men, and shipped 546,922 tons in 459 boat loads. The calcium carbonate content of the upper twenty feet of quarried stone ran between 85 and 98 percent. It was excellent flux. It went to blast furnaces in Buffalo, Cleveland, and Gary, and to lime kilns in Duluth.

The quarry company eventually owned about 1,000 acres of the island's 2,888 total area. They quarried away the island's higher elevations entirely. Morrison noted that the area above 620 feet had been "largely quarried away" by his visitation in 1950. The company quarried through the glacial grooves without hesitation.

The quarry closed in 1941. Not because anyone had a crisis of geological conscience; the equipment was old, the docking facilities were inadequate, and the company could supply demand more cheaply from its operations at Marblehead on the mainland. What survives of the grooves today is, essentially, whatever the quarrymen couldn't reach or didn't bother with before the economics stopped making sense.

The grooves are now behind a fence on a boardwalk, maintained by the ODNR. Visitors look down into them from above. They are genuinely spectacular, even in their reduced state. It's fifteen feet of polished, striated Devonian limestone, the scratch marks of a continent-sized ice sheet still legible after eighteen millennia. Fossils from the Columbus Limestone's original marine environment are visible in the groove walls. You can stand on an Ordovician-to-Devonian carbonate platform, look at the gouges left by Pleistocene ice, and contemplate the fact that the most destructive force to visit this particular piece of rock was not a mile-thick glacier but a limestone company from Cleveland.

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Thinking of them today since Kelley's Island is currently seeing its record flooding.

(If you go: Kelleys Island Ferry from Marblehead, grooves are free to visit. Inscription Rock, a flat-topped limestone boulder on the south shore covered in Native American petroglyphs, is nearby and worth the walk. Bring sunscreen; the island is flat, treeless in spots, and the lake breeze is a liar.)

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Works Cited

Bolsenga, Stanley J. and Charles E. Herdendorf, eds. Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair Handbook (Wayne State University Press, 1993).

Forsyth, Jane L. Dating Ohio's Glaciers. Ohio Division of Geological Survey, Information Circular No. 30 (1961).

Forsyth, Jane L. "Geology's Contribution to Ohio's Landscapes." The American Biology Teacher 27, no. 5 (May 1965): 358-362.

Kesler, Stephen E. Great Lakes Rocks: 4 Billion Years of Geologic History in the Great Lakes Region (University of Michigan Press, 2019).

Morrison, Paul Cross. "Kelleys Island, Ohio: An Economy in Transition." Economic Geography 26, no. 2 (April 1950): 105-124.

Photo Credit: Kelly's Island official website.

I appreciate that Crete is well travelled but I was still super impressed by the Skalia region on the south coast. My family and I came to Crete ten years ago for three weeks and was grateful I had another chance just now for a little over a week.

My friends and I stayed at Chora Skafion a pretty fishing village. We stayed at Samariá hotel right on the waterfront with amazing views and stylish rooms.

Chora skafion was where the allied troops were evacuated from in WW2 - New Zealand troops were key in the battle for Crete so has some personal relevance for me. The hotel staff told us of the locals executed for helping hide abandoned troops from the Germans.

The E4 long distance trail also passes through here. We walked two sections - to loutro a boat access only touristy fishing village and from Loutro to marama a busy beach with a taverna and sea caves for snorkeling. The sea is crystal clear - the trail is rough and very very hot in July but there are regular tavernas for resupply.

We also walked the Imbros gorge , my colleague is an engineering geologist so gave us a run down of the limestone bedding and mudstone deposits as we walked. Imbros is a slightly shorter version of the much more popular Samariá gorge. We hiked it for about 2hrs downslope and got the shuttle back to our car in Imbros village.

I also visited Frangokastello, a Venetian castle at a pretty beach near Chora skafion. Unfortunately the wind was so strong I could barely stand up so did not snorkel there.

So photos are e4, frangokastello, and Imbros gorge.

Now back to NZ to go skiing…

I got back from Peru and it was one of the best experiences of my life. 4days/3nights, 44 kilometers, ending with Machu Picchu. Hard to put into words.

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Before I went I had a many questions and found it hard to get straight answers in one place, so here I am. The trail must be done with a licensed guide and permits sell out months in advance, so start planning early. The second day is the hardest with Dead Woman's Pass at over 4,200 meters, but it is absolutely worth it.

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Happy to answer anything, packing, altitude, tour operators, fitness prep, or what to do in Cusco around the trip. Ask me anything.

Loved the silence and serenity this place has, only broken by the crunch of sand and gravels beneath our steps. A great place to be introspective.

Here I present a list of some of the largest and most emblematic wildlife species of the Picos de Europa National Park, first established in 1918 and expanded in 1995 in the Asturias province (North Spain).

Photos: Brown bear (Ursus arctos), grey wolf (Canis lupus), Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra), Cantabrian chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra), red fox (Vulpes vulpes), red deer (Cervus elaphus), roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), bearded vulture (Gypaetus barbatus), wild boar (Sus scrofa), wildcat (Felis silvestris), badger (Meles meles) and Iberian desman (Galemys pyrenaicus).

17.46506° S, 44.60018° E