Clams!

CLAMMING

This weekend, my friend and I decided that we wanted to experience something that is distinctly "Maine". We headed out at 10:30 am to Thomas Point Beach, located on the New Meadows River in Brunswick. We arrived at the beach just as the tide was at its lowest. This was the perfect situation. There were families playing in the sand, couples sunbathing, and adults reading...but we were most interested in the men wading in the mud a couple hundred yards from the beach face. They were knelt over, digging ferociously in the sandy mud, straightening periodically to throw something into the bucket standing next to them. We had come to the beach to do exactly what they were doing--clam digging. Clamming is the act of 'harvesting clams from below the surface of the tidal mud flats where they live.' We came lacking any knowledge of how to go about finding clams. All we knew is that our dinner was centered around all the clams that we would be finding!

Before I explain the clamming process, here's a
little bit about clams: clams are animals that burrow under the seafloor. They have two hard shells that protect the soft inner body (the part that we eat!) They have a large 'foot' that is used to burrow into the mud, and when threatened, clam retract into their shells, and close the shell so as to protect themselves.


Clamming is quite the science. What is the most important thing one needs in order to have a successful clamming trip? Low tide or the earlier stages of the incoming tide. We need to be able to walk to the where the clams are located! Secondly, we look for holes in the mud. These holes should be approximately the circumference of your pointer finger. Everywhere you see a hole, there's a clam in the mud below! When we found an area that had a lot of holes, we'd kneel, and dig until we couldn't dig any deeper! At the beginning, we were finding a lot of baby clams, ones of an inadequate size. But as we dug deeper, we found more appropriately sized clams. One recommendation: use more than bare hands to dig in the mud. The tips of my fingers are very beaten up as a result of the sharp shells and rocks in the mud in which we were digging. Many clammers use 'clam hoes', which look like no more than the end of a pitchfork. I'm sure that's more successful than our bare hands were!

Giant Stairs!

MAINE'S BOLD COAST

Maine's bold coast is one of its distinctive qualities. When I first arrived in Maine, I was surprised, for I had never before seen sedimentary rocks with vertical orientation, as are many rocks along the Maine coast. It is amazing that a quick examination of a site can give you a complex geologic history of the area. For me, this meant exploring the area, and researching how each specific characteristic is formed.

Recently, I explored the Giant Stairs, an 'unusual geologic feature of the eastern side of Bailey Island.' The Giant Stairs are a rock formation that resemble a staircase, but there's nothing man-made about it. The stairs actually formed as a result of seafloor spreading. Over a long period of time, sediments had been building up, forming a crust on the ocean floor. When the seafloor spread, huge cracks were torn in the sedimentary rocks. When these breaks were made, hot magma from the earth's core rose into that crack, leaving the igneous rock we see today. Giant Stairs is a really cool feature of Maine--one that everyone should check out. It's amazing to realize that rocks and geologic features like this one are millions of years old. That is incredibly old!


Have you ever noticed the interesting orientation of the rocks along Maine's coast? To many, this looks unnatural. Sedimentary rocks originally form in the ocean as thin layers of sand or mud. Over time, these layer solidify, leaving the ocean floor as layered rock. The layers alternate between the lighter sandstone, and darker mudstone. As it lays on the ocean floor, the rocks are horizontal. The vertical orientation of the rocks are actually formed as a combined result of the sedimentation and the buckling of the ocean's crust with the formation of the Mid-Atlantic ridge (the Mid-Atlantic ridge is an undersea mountain range in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean). With the uplifting of the tectonic plates, a buckling motion occurred, forcing the sedimentary rock onto its side.

Want to know more about Maine's history? Look at the rocks and fossils around you--they'll tell you everything!