Ringing Rocks Park - Upper Black Eddy, PA
N 40° 33.750 W 075° 07.769
18T E 489038 N 4490200
In this park is a 7-8 acre field of boulders that have an unusual property. When struck with a hammer or another rock, the rocks sound as if they are metal and hollow and ring with a sound similar to a metal pipe being struck.
Waymark Code: WMHV0B
Location: Pennsylvania, United States
Date Posted: 08/13/2013
Views: 4
Come for the earthcache but stay for the fun! These rocks emit musical tones when struck with an object like a hammer, so bring one! Not all the rocks play music, maybe a third of them or so. I went with a geocaching group a few years back to check it out and wasn't expecting much but I was pleasantly surprised to say the least. You must wear hiking boots or an incredible pair of sneakers as this is dangerous and can snap an ankle in a heartbeat! Once you walk to the middle, you are amidst several acres of rock and it is perilous. This is a publicly accessible park with geocaches and lots of nature and parking is abundant at the entrance. It is not that far of a walk.
Now for a little of the science behind it, I went to the Ringing Rocks site and found the following:
The boulders are made of a substance called diabase which is basically volcanic basalt. This is one of the largest diabase boulder fields in the Eastern United States. The boulders have a high content of iron and aluminum and were thought to have broken apart during the Pleistocene Epoch probably about 12,000 years ago. The boulders were created through many years of freeze-thaw cycles that broke up the diabase into individual pieces, a process known as "frost wedging". The rocks may then have accumulated in this one area as the water saturated soil provided lubrication for the stones to "creep" downhill to their present location, a process known as "solifluction". This could have happened during the prior ace ages when overlying most soil literally slid over the frozen permafrost below, carrying the boulders with it.
SOURCE
If you are into satellite imagery or oddities, check out what it looks like on Google Earth. It is a great big brown patch in the middle of green. The patch is completely devoid of all vegetation and anything green except for maybe some of that stuff which grows on rocks. The boulder field's longest height or length or whatever you want to call it is 250 feet. This number is pretty exact. From side to side or its width it is 146 feet at its longest span.
All text, narrative and anecdotes in this waymark were written by the submitter except for where cited with referenced link. All pictures and coordinates were taken by the submitter or taken by my group I was with on Earth Day 2007.