'ROCKY - STILL LONELY'

Here's one for the locals and any tourists heading to Port Macquarie.....                    
“Rocky Beach?...never heard of it!...where’s that?”

You call this a beach?? You might be in the middle of town but you can't swim here, or surf, or picnic, or sunbathe on sand…probably not much good for fishing even and not a place to go on your ‘Molly Malone’ - alone.   About all it's good for is vagrants who sometimes hide in a cave (rent free with a million dollar view!) or for growing special green rocks that look like snake-skin!   
If you ever get to visit Rocky you will no doubt exclaim: “Well, this is different!”

The Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism has this to say about our forgotten beauty:

"Rocky Beach is notable for the presence of well-exposed high-pressure metamorphic rocks and a wide variety of igneous rocks, including pillow basalt and minor matic and intermediate calc-alkaline intrusions, imbedded in lenses of serpentinite melange. Near the north end of Rocky Beach, a 'melange-in-melange' structure contains inclusions of lawsonite eclogite, omphacitite, blueschist and tremolite marble. These exotic rocks are unique because of some of these tectonic blocks, namely eclogite, contain a mineral called lawsonite, which have only been identified in 10 localities worldwide. Lawsonite eclogite and omphacitite are the only occurences documented in Australia. Formation and preservation of these rocks requires cold subduction to mantle depths and rapid exhumation."

Phew! Whatever does all that jargon mean?                                                       
Apparently lonely Rocky Beach is a geologist's gem because it is adorned with volcanic rock such as basalt scrambled with marble and laced with a mineral mixture found nowhere else in Australia and in only 10 sites worldwide. If you really want to know, lawsonite is ‘hydrous calcium aluminium sorosilicate’ and that ‘snake-skin’ serpentinite is magnesium silicate.
"So what?" you say.

How far to the nearest known extinct volcano? Comboyne, 45 kilometres away.

These rocks have travelled.....they have been sucked down to at least 7 kilometres beneath the ocean floor, subjected to extreme pressure at perhaps a mild 700 degrees C, scrambled along the way, then punched up to put Port Macquarie on the map – and it didn’t take millions of years.

Surely this isn’t the result of the Great Flood of Genesis 7 - when ''the fountains of the deep were broken up''?  That's meant to be a myth!                                                  

…or is it?

 

Acknowledgements:                                                                         

Brad McKay, Port Macquarie                                                                        

www.geomaps.com                                                                                       

wikipedia.org