Gros Morne National Park
— — the place the Earth's mantle came up to look around.
Not only on a wall.
“Newfoundland's west coast, where a slice of the Earth's mantle was thrust to the surface roughly 485 million years ago and stayed there. The Tablelands' rust-orange peridotite gives the park its strangeness; Western Brook Pond's six-hundred-metre cliffs give it the scale. A UNESCO site since 1987. The Long Range Mountains end here in fjord-like ponds and a quiet shore.
Gros Morne National Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Gros Morne covers 1,805 square kilometres of Newfoundland's west coast, taking its name from the 806-metre Gros Morne mountain at the park's centre. The northern half holds the Long Range Mountains, the southern half the Tablelands. UNESCO inscribed the park as a World Heritage Site in 1987 for both its geological significance and its glacial landforms. The closest service town is Rocky Harbour; the gateway airport is Deer Lake, about an hour south by road on Route 430, the Viking Trail.
The Tablelands expose a section of the Earth's mantle thrust onto continental crust during the closing of the Iapetus Ocean, roughly 485 million years ago. The rock is peridotite, an ultramafic, magnesium-iron-rich stone normally hidden tens of kilometres beneath the surface. Its high iron content rusts on exposure to the atmosphere, which is why the plateau reads orange against the green of the surrounding hills. The geology was a primary reason for the 1987 UNESCO inscription, and the same outcrop is still studied by geologists today.
Western Brook Pond is the park's signature water, a fifteen-kilometre freshwater fjord-lake cut by glacial ice through the Long Range, with cliffs rising over six hundred metres on either side. Tour boats run from late May through early October, weather permitting. Bonne Bay to the south is the park's marine inlet, where pilot whales pass through in summer. The shoreline along Route 430 is studded with smaller ponds the locals simply call ponds.