This meat-eating purplish plant rears its head on long stem, demonstrating its tenacity as one of the few living things along the Tablelands. One such plant can be found along the 4km Tablelands Trail: the pitcher plant, Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial flower. “One of the ways a plant survives in a place where there’s no nutrients… is that it’s a carnivorous plant, so it catches insects and gets its nutrients that way.”
According to Morrill, these rocks "have higher concentrations of metals that some plants would find toxic,” she said, explaining that most plants would wither away in this extreme environment. Morrill has spent her career studying ophiolites (exposed pieces of mantle) around the globe, and now focuses on the Tablelands’ otherworldly landscape. “It’s just so beautiful and it’s so accessible.” “Out of all the ones that I work at, the Tablelands is the only one that is like strikingly barren rock rising above the tree line,” she said. (Credit: Marc Guitard/Getty Images)Īccording to Dr Penny Morrill, a professor at Memorial University’s Earth Science Department, almost every continent has a piece of mantle but many are not as easily accessible. When scientists realised that the barren rock emerging from the dense forest of Gros Morne was, in fact, a broken-off piece of the Earth’s mantle, it helped prove the theory that the Earth is covered in tectonic plates. Prior to the in-depth study of the Tablelands in the 1960s, plate tectonics was only a hypothesis. “It just sort of popped up during post-glacial rebound like a lot of the other features that you see in western Newfoundland, and it’s being eroded away as we speak.” “It would have eroded away in a few million years it’s preserved because it’s been underground most of the time since it was formed,” said Leitch. This landscape remained pretty well buried until finally, just 12,000 years ago after the last Ice Age, the mantle became visible. When continents shift, fragments of crust are often subducted, or recycled, back into the Earth, but in this case, a fragment of the Earth’s mantle, which had been a piece of the ocean floor, was pushed up to form the Tablelands. According to Dr Alison Leitch, a geophysicist at Memorial University of Newfoundland, 500 million years ago, as the supercontinent of Pangea was beginning to form and the Iapetus Ocean was closing, what would now be considered North America and Europe were colliding.
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