Exhibit Room
In the south wing of our Environmental Education Center, visitors will find a museum-style room featuring educational displays on topics ranging from wetlands to landfills. These displays are geared for ages 9 and up, and will be on a rotational schedule to give guests a fresh experience each time they visit. The Exhibit Room is open to the public on Saturdays from 10 am – 2 pm.
“Rocks, Rocks, and more Rocks”
The Seneca Meadows Education Center “rocks!” Can you see the boulders outside and spread around the building? The boulders are called erratics because they didn’t form here. They had to move. We can see these in many places in the world, especially northern countries, and the evidence points to what brought them in, Glaciers! Glaciers are the only erosional “force” that can carry such boulders great distances (100’s of miles). These boulders were found locally, then people finished their move to the SMEC when it was built in 2008.
All the local bedrock in Central NY, up to but not including the Adirondacks, is sedimentary. Most of this rock formed which formed here, under a vast inland sea, 100’s of millions of years ago. So, erratics can be any other big types of rocks that “don’t belong,” igneous, metamorphic, and in some cases sedimentary. Here are 4 examples.
Interpretives around the SMEC – Rocks-1
#1: This rock is sandstone. It is sedimentary (formed from sediments—pieces of other, older rocks)
Interpretives around the SMEC – Rocks-2
#2. This rock shows very fine layers of sediment. It also sedimentary and these sediments are smaller than those in the sandstone (#1).
Interpretives around the SMEC – Rocks-3
#3. This rock is Gneiss (pronounced “nice”). It is metamorphic, meaning it was at high temperature, not melted, and under immense pressure, deep in the Earth. The different colors (especially the lines or bands) are minerals, not sediments.
Interpretives around the SMEC – Rocks-4
4. This rock is granite. It is igneous, meaning that it must have melted just before it formed. Igneous rocks may be from volcanoes but this one is not, forming very deep in the Earth. As in metamorphic rock, the different colors are minerals, not sediments.