Happy 150 Years to Canada

Without the risk of jumping on the familiar band wagon and screeching Happy Canada Day in a crowd full of happy and drunken Torontonians or wherever these people are from, we all celebrated the sesquicentennial incoming with the question, "what's with the duck?"

But I was there to photograph it along with so many others trying to get that perfect shot, feeling stupid.  I even witnessed some man from Hong Kong yelling at his girlfriend for moving because he was looking for that perfect night shot of her profile in front of a giant yellow duck.  I had to laugh. 

Never before have I ever felt so stupid for being part of a 'once in a lifetime' moment.

Next up! Fireworks from the CN tower.  Are we all that spoiled that we are not fascinated by fireworks anymore?  I never heard an ooooh  or an ahhhhhh  from the crowd while these beautiful flowers of light were coming from the sides of the CN restaurant.  I did my best to take the shots as they came, but I couldn't help but feel a little bored of the colours of red.  My personal favorite is blue, so perhaps the hues of blue would have brought some more activity from my camera.

The final show was from the docks of the Asbridges Bay, where I had to chuckle as we all, as a crowd felt compelled to move and shuffle to a different direction to view because we didn't know where the fireworks were coming from.  Here's the best of the lot! :)

Scarborough Bluffs

I have often wondered if they had ever done a yearly analysis on the erosion rate of the Scarborough Bluffs, since I had noticed over time a substantial decrease in the height of the mountainous height of sand level. I did find this from a study in 1979. 

"Bluffer's Park, a 2.41km reach of Lake Ontario shoreline in the Borough of

Scarborough, was used as a case study.  The erosion rate, being an annual measure of a volume of material eroded from a linear metre of shore linehaving a bluff height of 1 metre (m3/m/m/yr), was found to be 0.34m3/m/m/yr.)  This rate is an average over the face of the bluff and is in the same range as the rates normally associated with other areas of Scarborough Bluffs. "

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Springs first thaw has created flooding in certain parts of Toronto this year.  I've never seen the bluffers with so much overflow, leaving muck piles everywhere.  Water is rising due to global warming and I've heard the cottage is flooded, but we'll wait until we can get closer to check it out.

There are certain looks that the Bluff cliffs give that makes me think of Arizona for some reason? 

The layers of sand and clay exposed in these cliffs display a remarkable geological record of the last stages of the Great Ice Age. Unique in North America, they have attracted worldwide scientific interest. The first 46 metres of sediments contain fossil plants and animals that were deposited in a large river delta during the first advance of the Wisconsinan glacier some 70,000 years ago. They are covered by 61 metres of boulder clay and sand in alternating layers left by four subsequent advances and retreats of ice. The final withdrawal of the glacier occurred some 12,000 years ago.

They also found clay minerals int he triassic rocks in the colorado plateau, which would explain why I relate the two North American sites.