Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Landscape & Wildlife
From unexplored wilderness to dramatic coastlines and phenomenal wild-
life, the provinces of Atlantic Canada are a nature-lover's dream. It's a place
where you are as likely to see thousands of seabirds resting on a passing
iceberg as a moose crossing the road, and, if you're lucky, you may spot
feeding blue whales or a wandering polar bear (in Labrador or Newfound-
land). This rich and varied landscape is easily explored courtesy of the re-
gion's many parks, ranging from the alluring sandy beaches of Prince Ed-
ward Island National Park to the soaring fjords of Gros Morne National Park
in Newfoundland.
A Geologist's Dream
The spectacular landscapes of Atlantic Canada are both their charm and their challenge.
Due to the rugged land and crumpled coastlines, the traditions of isolated villages and
homesteads have been preserved to a greater extent than perhaps anywhere else in North
America, but the difficulty of coaxing crops from the rocky soil or transporting goods to
market keeps much of the region economically depressed to this day.
For geologists this region hides great wealth, not just in rich ore deposits but in the re-
cord of earth history preserved by the rocks. This is where two significant geologic
provinces converge: Labrador forms the eastern rim of the vast Canadian Shield, the
greatest exposure of ancient rocks on the earth's surface; while the other Atlantic
provinces perch themselves at the northern tip of the Appalachian Mountains, which is the
single most important topographic feature of eastern North America.
Sitting at this great convergence, Atlantic Canada offers a visually dramatic snapshot of
more than one billion years of earth history, ranging from the red sandstone cliffs of
Northumberland Strait to the famed granite headlands at Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia. And
perhaps even more fascinating for the visitor are the many signs of the massive Pleisto-
cene ice sheet that smothered the region with ice a mile deep as recently as 20,000 years
ago: the thrilling fjords of the north, the rounded mounds of Nova Scotia (known locally
as drumlins), the tens of thousands of small shallow lakes.
In its simplest form, the geologic story is that Atlantic Canada formed from the frag-
ments and pieces left over after North America and Africa collided and crushed an ocean
between them 400 million years ago. In the process of swinging into each other with tre-
mendous force, the two continents compressed and folded seafloor sediments into a giant
mountain chain that has eroded over millions of years into the rolling hills we now call the
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