Metoria Söderfjärden

On our way from Vaasa to Turku, we made an interesting stop at Metoria Söderfjärden where one of those huge asteroid/meteors hit earth 520 million years ago creating worldwide devastation and a huge crater for future humans to wonder at.

The Visitor Center

The meteor is supposed to drop showing how it really happened.

Over the millennia, the crater slowly filled with sandstone soil and water creating a wetland that was drained in the 1920s to create what we see today, a vast 6.6 kilometer diameter circle of farmland. It is a beautiful site as one drives to the epicenter of the crater and the visitor center. The variety of green and yellow crops are like candy to the eyes as one looks out to the rim of the crater and its ring of trees.

Linda and Cherie checking out the poster about the sun

The posts are for each planet (no post for Pluto)

The folks who designed the visitor center used the site to teach some interesting science along the way. As we drove in, we were greeted by a sign offering an app explaining the signs we would be passing. Each sign represents a planet (no Pluto) spaced to represent the real distances between them in our solar system. Of course the sun is at the center where we found several old buildings repurposed as mini-museums. One of these holds old farm equipment. Another houses meteorites from around the world. A cafeteria is in the old threshing barn. The old pumphouse is here along with an energy barn: a few solar panels and a windmill to exhibit green energy sources.

Along the side of the exhibit site is another set of signs, this one representing the timeline since the meteor smashed into two just about the earth 520 million years ago. Again the distances and between signs represent the times between events. The last sign tells us that human time is shown by the thickness of the piece of paper that information is printed on.

We climbed the bird watching tower to get a better view of the overall scene. This is not bird season. During the fall the caldera is filled with cranes on their way south. Metoria Söderfjärden is their main feeding ground as they fly to their wintering grounds. We did not see it, but there is supposed to be a telescope and small observatory here, too.

Finally, they have a model of the asteroid landing in the crater. In theory, pushing a button activates the asteroid to glow and crash into the crater. We pushed the button Andrea nothing happened.

Raspberries

With that we drove on to Turku where we will spend two nights before boarding the ferry to the Åland archipelago where we will search for ancestral links. The drive was interesting in that we passed a lot of farmland especially in the area around Vaasa. While we did see a couple of potato fields, almost every field we saw was planted in some sort of grain. The Finns do make great bread and are so in love with rye bread it has been officially named the Finnish bread. We remembered that is the reason the ‘boys’ at the Kyrö Distillery decided to make rye whiskey. Forests became more dominant again as we approached Turku. We continue to be disappointed that we have seen no moose or bear.