colk2004 said...
Samphire in the UK is also known as 'poor mans asparagus', very tasty boiled up with a load of butter. Not so sure about the poor bit as it seems to be turning up in cooking shows as some posh side dish!
Puzzled as to why your lake needs a plaster cast though....was it broken? All the gypsum mining I've ever seen involved (1 mine just up the road from where I lived as a child) involved a lot of blasting and whacking great holes in the ground. Some sort of settlement lake?
Cheers Col
your samphire is basically the same as ours except that your is on tidal salty flats, ours is growing on a thin poor soil over hypersailne groundwater.
the lakes are low points that have accumulated fines over millions of years ....
and salt. in this case the surface is a fluffy mix of fine windblown gypsum and precipitated gypsum. on the unaltered surface you just dont drive on it, but where we sailed it has been compressed and recoated with gypsum that has been heated to make it into plaster . so when water is added and it is rolled you have a hard surface.
geologically where we sail is what the North Sea looked like after the last ice age, when the ice melted and sea levels rose to swamp the grasslands. as the land was still flat drainage went inwards to form lakes , gypsum and salt layers formed , which later were raised above sealevel, buried under loess(windblown glacial fines) and compressed to form a rock deposit. the samphire you have on your tidal marshes is a remnant vegetation from that time.
well the geology lesson is done.so please take out your text and read up on " remnant vegetation related to the end of the last Ice age"
there will be an exam tommorow
of course typing this has cut into my alotted time so I cant do the next post on my speed pod, AND I wont have time to let you all know about my exciting new find
