26 June 2012
Blown away by Bancroft: Part IV
Posted by Jessica Ball
I’m feeling particularly uninterested in staring at my model run today, so here’s the last installment of Bancroft. (Only a few months after the fact!) On the last morning of our Bancroft field trip this past April, we continued our journey through the metamorphic faces diagram with a stop at an outcrop north of Bancroft on ON-28, in the amphibolite facies.
How did we know we were in the amphibolite facies? Well, we were looking at a lovely garnet-biotite-gneiss (too high for greenschist to begin with)..
But a careful examination of the top of the outcrop revealed another clue: Kyanite!
We did a lot of arguing over what kind of kyanite it was. I don’t know if anyone ever settled on a type, but it was lovely to see in outcrop just the same.
But that was all eclipsed by our next stop at the Princess Sodalite Mine. There’s some neat history here; the mine was first opened in the late 19th century, and it became known as the “Princess” Sodalite Mine in the early 1900s, when the Prince and Princess of Wales (King George V and Queen Mary) visited and subsequently ordered tons of the sodalite-bearing rock to decorate Marlborough House in London. The current owner of the mine, Andy, is a great guy who allows UB students to visit every year before tourist season opens up. (He also has a really spiffy Scottish accent, and he knows a lot about the mining history of the region.) Before we went into the quarry to have a look at the sodalite, we checked out a glacially polished outcrop of nepheline syenite behind the rock shop. It was a nice glacial feature, but the most exciting part was the huge leucite phenocrysts! Literally, leucite as big as your face. This mineral forms in silica undersaturated melts where orthoclase is replaced by feldspathoids (also including nepheline).
The quarry itself is only open to the public on a limited basis. The blasting necessary to get at the best sodalite concentrations means that it can be dangerous to do too much hammering in the quarry, but we got to spend some time breaking up chunks of syenite from already-blasted piles.
The Princess Sodalite Mine isn’t just a mineral-hunter’s wonderland, however. Just around the corner from the quarry is a fantastic glacial landscape:
Andy also keeps a “rock garden” just beyond the outcrop – it’s full of a collection of samples from mines all over Ontario, and apparently a few places even farther afield. If you go to visit the mine, you can pay by the pound to take rocks and minerals from here.
We could have spent hours at the mine, but we had to move on to another mine (the Macdonald Mine, also north of Bancroft, but on ON-62). This was a spectacular granite pegmatite, and was apparently the largest working feldspar mine in the area.
The spoil piles on the hills around the mine are full of crystalline and smokey quartz, and you can find zircons in the smokey quartz if you look very carefully. I managed to snag a piece with multiple zircons, although I didn’t have the foresight to take a photo of it before working on this post.
The last stop of the trip actually took us completely out of the metamorphic phase diagram and into the realm of igneous processes. This outcrop on ON-127 is an excellent example of partial melting in a gneissic rock – or migmatite! (Callan would appreciate this one.) The dark layers here are mostly biotite, while the pink layers are mainly feldspar and quartz (a more granitic composition). This rock was subjected to so much heat and pressure that it ‘sweated out’ (Callan’s words) the granitic melt that you see in the pink areas.
This was a seriously messed up metamorphic rock. There were folds everywhere, and even a chunk of skarn that had been cross-cut by a granitic melt.
For a volcanologist, seeing a migmatite among all those metamorphic rocks was kind of comforting. (And considering that we had several hours of driving and a border crossing before we could go home, I definitely appreciated the comfort.)
And thus ends the epic posting! I promised a commenter that I would try and make a Google Map of all the field trip stops, so you will see one more post about Bancroft in the future, but it may take a while.
My mother spends summers in Rosseau, about an hour and a half west of Bancroft, and I’ve been to the latter area twice. Awfully glad you got to see the quarry at the Princess Mine; I’ve been curious. When I visited that site in 1988, the (then) owner was very rude in response to a request to see it. This area broadly- from Sudbury, to Timmins, to Bancroft, and over to Gravenhurst/Bracebridge, is one that is near and dear to my heart. Thanks for this series… I’m a little nostalgic.
Glad you’ve enjoyed it! If you do get a chance to come back, the current owner (Andy) is one of the nicest people I’ve met – especially since he let us cart off so many excellent samples for free. And it’s a beautiful area as well.
Thanks for the shout-out. I do love me some anatexis.
Very impressive kyanite and leucite crystals! Actually, I’m drooling over most of the pictures in this post. Looks as if it was a great field trip!
It was! If you’re ever out Buffalo way, perhaps a return trip can be arranged… 🙂
Sounds great, Jessica. I’ll let you know if I’m ever out that way… no plans at the moment, but you never know. If you ever make your way to southern Africa, Jackie and I will show you the sights here 🙂
Wow!
Thanks for the beautiful pics. Takes me back 30 years. I would love to take the trip up from mass. My family not as much. They get nervous when I drive past outcrops for some reason. Also they don’t seem to understand how important geology is, dullards all, love them anyway.
Jessica, thank you very much for this blog series. I have recently moved to Peterborough, Ontario and am starting to explore the fantastic geology in the area.