![]() And the waters teem-though not as they once did-with fish large and small, lobsters, crabs, dolphins, and a great deal more (each creature with its particular habits, habitats, diets, life cycles, and seasonal migration patterns). Seabirds make similar passages, lighting upon the rocks and lakes of the park coming and going. Migrating whales make for a wonderful spectacle twice each year (and whale-watching tours out of Bar Harbor bring the lives of whales closer to the visitor). The spruces and firs may eventually take over again-but it will take generations to happen.Īcadia’s unique position-it is very near the warm Gulf Stream, yet possesses very cold waters it is not far from the high, shallow undersea plateau known as Georges Bank-has also brought an astonishing variety of marine life to its doorstep. Fireweeds, wildflowers, aspens, birch, oak, pine, and maple trees began to slowly fill in the denuded landscape and today help create the mixture of plants (and the fall foliage, and the deer, mice, and other animals that favor this mixture) in the park today. In the ashes soon grew not more spruces and firs, but rather an entire new set of flowers, weeds, and trees better adapted to grow in bright, sunny, nutrient-poor meadows. Islanders got a lesson in nature’s restorative powers in 1947, when a huge forest fire swept across the park and island, devastating most of it. The park, though it appears to be fixed in time now, is actually in constant flux. ![]() ![]() Many others survived, however, and there’s plenty of wildlife here today while the lynx and eastern cougar may no longer roam the woods, hills, and fields of Acadia, plenty of other creatures do. Land animals came here, too, some of them now extinct from the island-the caribou, elk, eastern timber wolf, and sea mink among those extirpated by human presence. Yet they persevered, and soon the spruces, firs, and hemlocks formed an impenetrable thicket covering the bedrock. It was tough work: Acadia is a rocky, acidic place. After each ice age, conifers such as spruce and fir trees-alongside countless grasses and weeds-began to reform, decompose, and form soils. Onto the bones of this landscape came plants and then animals. When the glaciers finally retreated for the last time, tens of thousands of years ago, the water melting from the huge ice sheet covering North America swelled the level of the Atlantic high enough to submerge formerly free-flowing river valleys and give Mount Desert Island the distinctive, knuckled-fist shape we know it for today. Huge boulders were swept up and deposited by the ice in odd places, such as the tops of mountains ( Bubble Rock is one). Near Somesville it nearly divided the island in two, creating the only natural fjord in the United States farther “inland,” the slowly flowing ice pushed forward and scooped out several more narrow, parallel valleys that would later be filled by rainwater to form Jordan Pond and Eagle Lake. Ice ages came and went, but the rocks remained the successive waves of great glaciation and retreat scratched up the rocks like old vinyl records, and the thick tongues of pressing ice cut deep notches out of the rock. Now in place, the rocks were once again changed by everything around them. This “collision” (which was more like an extremely slow-motion car wreck), heated, squeezed, transformed, and thrust up the rocks that now form the backbone of Mount Desert Island. Their journey was only beginning, however soon enough (geologically speaking, that is), what is now eastern North America and most of Europe began to shove up against each other, slowly but inexorably. Later, as natural forces such as wind and water wore away the upper layers of rock above these rocks, the rocks began to be exposed. At that time, deep wells of liquid rock known as magma were moving upward, exploding in underground volcanoes, then hardening-still underground, mind you-into granitelike rocks. The beginnings of Acadia National Park as we see it today are perhaps a half billion years old.
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