Why a Boulder garden in this place?
--Geologically because this is exactly where boulders would be expected to occur, and probably did occur before the campus was developed. Thus we have restored natural order.
--Educationally because it is in a place where hundreds of people can interact with it every hour during the day. AND where class can be easily held.
10,000 years ago a great continental glacier covered this part of North America and it was retreating to the east, melting rapidly and creating great rivers of melted ice and great terraces of gravel, like the ones now forming in Iceland. The flat area of the Michigan Tech campus was such a terrace and it was littered with great boulders which had been ripped from the bedrock by glacial movement and then rounded by river transport.
Bill Rose
Professor of Petrology
15 November 2010
