Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland

Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory features the Gros Morne National Park in the Great Northern Peninsula of western Newfoundland, Canada.

The park is a UNESCO World Heritage site which covers 690 square miles. Here, fragments of the Earth’s mantle have been exposed through ancient geological processes.

Gros Morne National Park contains a portion of the Long Range Mountains. This is a subrange of the Canadian Appalachians that dates back to a time when present-day North America collided with another continent around 1.2 billion years ago.The park takes its name from Newfoundland’s second-highest mountain peak (at 806 m or 2,644 ft) located within the park. Its French meaning is “large mountain standing alone,” or more literally “great sombre.” Gros Morne is a member of the Long Range Mountains, an outlying range of the Appalachian Mountains, stretching the length of the island’s west coast. It is the eroded remnants of a mountain range formed 1.2 billion years ago. “The park provides a rare example of the process of continental drift, where deep ocean crust and the rocks of the earth’s mantle lie exposed.

According to NASA, those mountains have since eroded and left behind the gneiss and granite peaks of the Long Range. 

Located on the south end of the park, the Tablelands consist of flat-topped land that is rich with peridotite rock from the upper part of Earth’s mantle. Around 500 million years ago, the rock was pushed toward the surface in a process known as subduction. 

The image was captured on October 3, 2017 by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8.

Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory 

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By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer