And the winner is...
Congratulations to ZK-LGD. He wins his choice of any Real New Zealand CD, or a EUR20 gift voucher from Simmarket.
Thanks to everyone who entered the competition. Of course the hill was transformed into the Rohan city of
Edoras, in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This was home to the King's Hall, Meduseld, known as the Golden Hall. As I hinted at earlier, you didn't really need to know the answer yourself, as I suspect that if you showed the pictures and the first question to five people at least one would say, hey, I know, that's Edoras! (Actually, I DID show it to five people, and four of them guessed correctly after I'd asked question one.)
The actual hill is
Mt Sunday, and is located in the Rangitata Valley, Canterbury. If you want to have a look at Mt Sunday within the simulator, the 'Lord of the Rings Location Guidebook' gives the location as S43* 32.899 E170* 53.591. However I suspect that you would need to have a high resolution mesh to view it.
The last question was the most important, as it is a good introduction to web-based research. Once you figure out the first two questions, the last one should be easy, as you have a number of clues to begin your research. Well, actually you didn't even need to figure out the first two questions. If you copied this text from the question: 'rocky outcrop left behind after the passage of a glacier' -- and pasted it into a Google search, you wouldn't have to look far to find the answer. The second returned search for me was 'Glacial and Arid Landforms', which links to the James Cook University, Cairns, Australia. It describes a number of different glacial landforms, including one which includes the term 'rocky outcrop'.
I had to decide how precise the answer should be, as there are a number of similar glacial features. I was in fact looking for the term
'roche moutonnée'. This is a teardrop shaped feature, smoothed by the passage of the glacier on the 'up-stream' side, and rough and broken on the 'downstream' side, caused by the ice 'plucking' at the rock. A number of people suggested 'moraine', and although there is an element of moraine present, the question referred specifically to the 'rocky outcrop', which suggests that the rock was there before it was moulded by the glacier, rather the moraine debris which was left behind after the passage of the glacier. If the question had been 'what type of geological feature is Mt Sunday', then the answer could be a number of things, but the question purposefully referred to a particular feature, the rocky outcrop, rather than Mt Sunday itself.
The question arose as a result of discussions on using the simulator as an educational tool. I hope that you've learnt something here
