1. A window into the earth's mantle even more mysterious than Mars
- Theme A:
Learning about and enjoying the earth's transformation from peridotites
The earth is often compared to a boiled egg, with the shell representing its crust, the eggwhite its mantle and the yolk its core. The crust is between several kilometers and several tens of kilometers thick, but relative to the scale of the earth it can be seen as a thin rocky layer akin to an eggshell. Although mankind has the technology to send a probe tens of millions of kilometers through space to Mars, nobody has ever bored through the earth's thin crust to reach the mantle below. As a result, it remains an unknown world even more mysterious than Mars despite being only tens of kilometers from the earth's surface.
However, Mt. Apoi provides opportunities to view, come into contact with and experience this unknown world because the mountain consists of peridotite - the chief component of the earth's upper mantle. Part of the upper mantle deep under the earth's surface is considered to have been thrust up onto the earth's surface by global-scale ground movement to form Mt. Apoi. The mountain thus represents part of the area's valuable geological heritage and provides insights into the nature of the earth's interior. It also gives visitors the opportunity to sense the dynamic activity that the earth has undergone over hundreds of millions of years.