Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
way that turbulence is created when a river flows around a bend. Further, as the tide streams around the bend
of southwestern Nova Scotia, it runs up against horseshoe-shaped ledges that produce the frightful rips near
Brier Island—which are, in fact, miniature upwellings.
A herring weir is strategically located to catch juvenile herring along the New Brunswick shore, where they are
canned as sardines.
The visible result of these upwellings is not only turbulence and tide streaks but also a remarkable concen-
tration of marine life, from the smallest to the largest creatures found in the sea. Most notably, whales and
seabirds come to take advantage of the food-concentrating power of the tides. The copepod Calanus finmarchi-
cus is a big part of the attraction. This weak swimmer is brought to the surface by upwellings, where both red
and red-necked phalaropes—sea-going shorebirds—feast upon it. Until the 1990s, as many as a million red-
necked phalaropes congregated in the Passamaquoddy Bay area, while on the eastern side of Fundy, near Brier
Island, some ten thousand red phalaropes returned each year to feed during their north-south migrations in late
summer. These great flocks have largely disappeared in the last two decades for reasons that are not as yet
clear but may be related to nodal cycles, in which tidal amplitudes tend to increase for 9.3 years, then decrease
