Kingston 2017: GAC–MAC Joint Annual Meeting Field Trips

BACK TO WHERE IT BEGAN The Department of Geological Sciences and Geological Engineering of Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, will host the 2017 Annual meeting of the GAC–MAC. The meeting will coincide with the 175 anniversary of the founding of the Geological Survey of Canada, which was established by the legislature of the Province of Canada in 1842, in Kingston, and with Canada’s 150 anniversary celebrations. The local geology surrounding Kingston, commonly called the Limestone City, does not disappoint and multiple field trips associated with the meeting will take advantage of its unique location. Kingston is located at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, where the St. Lawrence River begins, draining the waters of the Great Lakes into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The transition from lake to river occurs east of Kingston Harbour, where the nearly flat-lying Early Paleozoic limestone, rimming the eastern Lake Ontario basin, border against a NW-SE trending, low ridge of Grenvillian Precambrian basement rocks, locally known as the Frontenac Arch, which connects the southeastern Ontario part of the Canadian Shield with the Adirondack Massif of northern New York State. The crystalline basement rocks form a resistant ridge over which the St. Lawrence River flows northeastward from Lake Ontario, creating the ‘Thousand Islands,’ a well-known tourist and cottage region along the international border that now also includes a National Park. The 2017 Kingston GAC–MAC meeting will provide seven field trip opportunities that span from Proterozoic geology to the present, and cover a wide range of Earth Sciences sub-disciplines, from geomorphology to hydrology, from Quaternary geology to metallogeny, and from tectonics to sedimentology. Trips range in length from one to five days, as homegrown as a day trip touring the local geology highlights of Kingston’s environs, and as far-afield as a five day transect traversing the accreted terranes of the Newfoundland Appalachians. The one-day ‘Bedrock to Beaches’ field trip will take participants from Kingston to Prince Edward County and back. Along the way, participants will track one billion years of evolution of the Kingston region. They will contemplate metasedimentary rocks that were heated, squeezed, and intruded by granite ca. 1170 million years ago, sandstone deposited by rivers and wind ca. 490 million years ago, limestone and shale deposited in tropical seawater ca. 455 million years ago, faults that displaced the limestone perhaps 176 million years ago, drumlins shaped by a continental ice-sheet about 20,000 years ago, a shoreline created by a giant proglacial lake ca. 13,200 years ago, and a thin soil full of frost-heaved limestone nodules that nowadays nourishes many of the best vineyards in ‘the County.’ Another one-day trip will explore local shallow neritic marine carbonate rocks on a tropical Ordovician Earth. Shallow water marine carbonate rocks are beautifully exposed in the Kingston area and many buildings in ‘the limestone city’ are made of these rocks. The easily accessible outcrops have been little altered since they were deposited ca. 450 million years ago and the components are easily visible making aspects of sedimentology, paleoecology, and diagenesis understandable to everyone. The carbonate rocks are world famous in this regard and have been studied for more than 150 years. The field excursion will visit sections exhibiting a range of paleoenvironments with plenty of time for illustration and discussion. Paleoceanography will range from arid tidal flats, through the paleothermocline, into interpreted cool water outer ramp storm and slope deposits. Fossils range from scarce to profuse reflecting changes in paleoseawater salinity and bottom paleotemperature. This trip has been used for many decades as a Volume 43 2016 287