Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
1
FOG SEEMED LIKE
a constant companion when I was growing up. My earliest memories are wrapped in it as if
in a comforting blanket. I grew up in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, at the very southwestern tip of that peninsular
province that points into the Gulf of Maine and is all but surrounded by water. Yarmouth averages 120 foggy
days a year, and the fog produced here by the interaction of land, sea, and air is often of the “pea soup” variety.
When summer air, warmed by the land, flows out over the tidally generated colder waters of the outer Bay of
Fundy, its moisture condenses, producing a fog bank. This fog would often burn off by midmorning, under the
heat of the rising sun, but move in again when sea breezes blew onto the land in the evening. Companion to
some, curse to others, to me the fog is the sea's breath, a reminder of the closeness of the sea and its influence
on all life in the Atlantic realm.
The Northwest Atlantic region of North America—the Northeastern United States, the Maritime Provinces in
Canada, coastal Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador— belongs to the sea. The maritime influence on cli-
mate, and therefore on flora and fauna, is dominant—even far inland, out of sight and sound of the ocean, and
even though weather systems generally move easterly off the continent. The prevailing wind is from the southw-
est in summer and from the northwest in winter, though strong cyclonic storms—the famous nor'easters that
blow in off the Atlantic—occasionally blast the coast. The continental weather systems would normally make
the winters long and cold and the summers very hot, but the ocean moderates these extremes. It is slow to heat
up but once warmed maintains its heat longer than the land, with consequences for the duration and intensity of
the seasons. The relative warmth of the ocean causes warmer weather to linger in the autumn— the so-called In-
dian summer—and makes the winter less severe than it is inland. In spring, however, the ocean has the opposite
effect. While the land heats up more quickly, the cooler ocean causes the spring to be delayed and summer near
the coast to be cooler and shorter than it is farther inland.
This maritime influence is greater in the coastal areas most exposed to the open ocean, such as Newfoundland
and Nova Scotia, than in the more protected areas like the Gulf of Maine and Gulf of St. Lawrence. The latter,
however, freezes over in winter, whereas in summer the shallow coastal area around eastern New Brunswick
and Prince Edward Island boasts the warmest waters north of the Carolinas. Farther north, landfast ice clings to
the Labrador coast from December until at least April, and icebergs, born in Greenland, drift into Newfoundland
waters late into the summer before succumbing to the warm waters of the Gulf Stream off the Tail of the Grand
Banks.
Cross Currents
The Northwest Atlantic coast extends from the northern tip of Labrador, at Cape Chidley, where a treeless tun-
dra prevails and polar bears and walrus haunt the coast, to Cape Hatteras, where the tropically warmed waters of
the Gulf Stream brush the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The predominant oceanographic influence on this
vast coastal region is the Labrador Current, colorfully described by the Newfoundland artist Christopher Pratt as
“a relentless flood of molten ice, the bloodstream of our near sub-Arctic climate.” The Labrador Current is cre-
ated when cold waters from Hudson Bay and the Davis Strait converge off Cape Chidley and flow southward
along the Labrador coast. It consists of two branches—a warmer, saltier offshore branch, which forms a counter-
