Nova Scotia (4 page)

   
The fault line in Nova Scotia, our own San Andreas, runs from
Chedabucto Bay to the Bay of Fundy. There’s a gorge along part of
it. Everything on my side of that line is from Africa. Gondwana was
jammed up against the old continent here, then pulled apart. Stuff
got dragged along in its wake, and this chunk was left behind to
give me Moroccan slate to carve a well into. I’ll be darned. The
big collision of the supercontinents happened about 400 million
years ago. Three hundred million years ago, Nova Scotia was still
on the equator and the pulling apart happened about 200 million
years ago.

   
All that dragging apart and leaving behind has something to
do with the ragged coastal shape of Nova Scotia, but the backbone
of this place is solid granite – granite that had been in
Africa/Gondwana for one and a half billion years before being left
behind here as the supercontinent cruised slowly away. Barrie pulls
out a geological map of the province and points to something “– a
“tension fracture” that almost broke and took the land back to
Africa. It was a close call. We could have lost almost all of Nova
Scotia.

   
I’m suddenly afraid that I don’t have the whole picture. Do I
really have the story from the very beginning? So he explains that
in the beginning, the earth was hot, molten until the outer surface
“froze,” solidified and became a crust-like scum rising to the top
of something boiling and then hardening there. Lavas keep breaking
through, then solidifying. The earth, he points out, is always
recycling, refining. “We’re a dynamic planet – destroying,
recreating.”

   
Destroying, recreating. It’s hard for me to see the big
geological picture, but I guess it’s like what I see each year
along the shoreline. In the summer the sand is deposited at the
beach where I surf. In the winter it’s washed away. Then it comes
back. But the beach keeps changing as well. Destroying, recreating.
That’s what the natural forces have been doing to coastal Nova
Scotia for a long time and will continue to do. Maybe humans have
done the same thing here. As the current fish crisis illustrates,
however, we’ve put too much effort into the first half of the cycle
and it’s time to shift to the re-creation mode.

Land of the
Mini-dinosaurs

The oldest dinosaur fossils in
Canada have been found along the Fundy Shore, near Parrsboro, Nova
Scotia. They date back 240 million years. The tides continually
erode the shorelines of this part of the province and have allowed
for wonderful discoveries of fragments from this distant, but
certainly not lifeless, past. Two American researchers, Paul Olsen
and Neil Shubin, made one of the largest finds ever for this time
period in 1986 when they unearthed more than a hundred pieces of
fossil bone. Along with Olsen and Shubin, scientists who have
studied the fossils from this area are convinced that something
catastrophic occurred way back then, causing a mass extinction of
the dinosaurs.

   
Most Nova Scotia dinosaurs were not massive. They grew to be
in the range of one to seventeen feet in length. The Otozoam, which
slinked around the mud flats, was something like a contemporary
crocodile. A lot of the creatures who ran around on the land were
the size of turkeys or ostriches. At least one mini-dinosaur had a
footprint of one centimetre, no larger than that of a
robin.

   
Keep in mind that back then, well before the ice ages, Nova
Scotia was located near the equator and covered in rain forests.
Known as the Coal Age, this period of time 300-500 million years
ago allowed for the build-up of organic materials that would
eventually be crushed and formed into coal.

   
A million years ago, the ice that crept down from the poles
to cover all of Nova Scotia was a kilometre and a half thick. The
glaciers advanced and retreated five or six times and between these
colder spells, animal and plant life would re-emerge. Right now, we
may well be living in one of those benevolent periods of time
between glaciers, some experts suggest.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Heavy Ice Gives Way to Glacial
Rebound

Not long after all the depositing
of materials from the collision and separation, Nova Scotia began
to erode. Glaciers, in their advances and retreats, destroyed a lot
of geological evidence. Ice ages came and went. Global temperatures
went down, then up. Seas rose and fell, all affecting the shape of
this coast. The most recent retreat of major ice was a mere 10,000
years ago.

   
If you fly over Nova Scotia, you can readily see what the
scouring and grinding of glaciers has done to us. Sediment has been
pushed off the land, leaving bare rock in many places. The lakes
tend to run north and south. Glacial action has left drumlins,
moraines and piles of till and kettle holes. Four-kilometre-thick
ice sitting on the land squeezed it and made it bulge outward into
the sea. You could have walked all the way to Sable Island on the
ice that sat on dry land in those days.

   
Periods of glacial rebound followed those frosty times when
the unweighted continents could push up as the land recovered. But
the water along the coastline would also rise as the ice melted,
drowning the coast again. Even now, we are seeing the results of
glacial melting as the sea intrudes further into the land. As
salt-water levels get higher, lakes will end up being inlets as the
salt water connects to the fresh.

   
The lake in front of my house, Lawrencetown Lake, seems to be
going in the opposite direction. It’s filling up with sediment and
has been for a long time. This body of water is shielded from the
sea by a wide low marsh and a set of sand dunes ravaged by sand and
gravel excavators of the 1950s. The sea will eventually have its
way here, sediment notwithstanding. It will break through. The
beach will retreat and then disappear altogether and if my
200-year-old house continues to stand, the waves will lap at my
driveway and a new breed of surfers will be riding waves where I
once gardened Swiss chard and peas. o

   
Here, drumlins, those whale-shaped hills of glacial debris,
elongated and cigar-like, are abbreviated now along the Eastern
Shore. Half of each of these soft-shouldered hills at Lawrencetown,
Seaforth and East Chezzetcook are chewed off. The land has been
gobbled, digested and is silting off toward the deeper sea bottom.
Citadel Hill in Halifax is primarily a drumlin and it too may one
day feel salt water slapping at its base. Barrie Clarke says
jovially, “I already have the concession for gondolas in Halifax;
as the city goes down, it will become the Venice of North America.
You’ll be able to cruise down Hollis Street in a boat.” When all
the ice melts, the sea level can go up as much as 150 metres.
“Farewell to Nova Scotia,” the chorus sings, saying goodbye to a
sizeable chunk of the most populated city of this fair
province.

A Paradise for Fish

The riches of the sea were once our
greatest resource. Through four ice ages, mud and sand were scraped
from the land here and dumped off the coast, creating a fertile
series of “banks.” The soils that could have supported good farming
were stolen from us and given to the fish. As the ice melted, the
sea rose over the banks of soil left out there, creating a great
place for minute life to develop, leading to higher forms who fed
on the lower ones until a massive population of fish cruised around
the Grand Banks and George’s Bank. It was here that the collision
of the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream took place, a
fortuitous combination that enhanced the production of teeming sea
life. The great Arctic current of the Labrador, 400 metres deep and
350 kilometres wide, is packed with rich minerals and tiny northern
sea creatures. The Gulf Stream, which is positioned 400 to 800
kilometres off the coast of Halifax, mixes with the cold water
here. The mineral-rich northern waters and the warmer southern
waters provide perfect conditions for the breeding of plankton
which are fed on Pby small fish such as capelin and small cod.
They, in turn, feed the bigger fish that are harvested by people.
Then we overfish without regard to the future and suddenly
something goes wrong. The cycle ends. Given time, the planet may
repair itself. No one knows how much time this can take.

   
In the heyday of the Grand Banks, cod was harvested by the
ton. A codfish can grow to noinety-six kilograms if left to survive
into old age. A female codfish is (or was) enormously fecund,
carrying as many as nine million eggs at once. Cod are omnivorous
and have been known to eat seabirds, bars of soap, metal, whole
scallops, lobsters or nearly anything. But drag the ocean floor for
decades destroying the habitat and even they cannot continue to
survive. Spawning must take place between 1.5 and 7°C. As global
temperatures change, that too may make successful breeding
impossible for the cod. And once the cod disappear, other ispecies
will not be far behind. The recent disaster in the fishery of the
Atlantic suggests that we may not see the recovery in our lifetime.
Perhaps it will take longer than our children’s lifetime. As the
history of Nova Scotia unfolds, the logic of this result seems all
too, well, logical. The British and the French first came here to
carry off whatever they could that was of value. They came to
exploit and that destiny has been fulfilled for these several
centuries in the fishery and to a lesser degree in the forests.
Once the exploitation is over, it will be time, we hope, for repair
and recovery.

Mastodons, Moose and Men

Before the ages of ice, Nova Scotia
had a rich diversity of animal and plant life. No major mountain
ranges impeded the traffic of wandering creatures or emigrating
plant life in any direction. Each interglacial period, however, saw
less variety and intensity of life. There were times of tundra and
vast fields of northern grasses with shrubs and sedge growing from
the moraines and the glacial till. In the valleys grew sugar maple
and hemlock, balsam fir, white spruce and white pine. The landscape
of much of Nova Scotia six thousand years ago may have looked a lot
like the barrens of Peggy’s Cove today. Sable Island, however,
probably has the same vegetation today as existed there 11,000
years ago. It wasn’t until as recently as 5,000 to 3,500 years ago
that the mixed forests of the province developed.

   
Well after the dinosaurs romped around, the mighty and hairy
mastodon could be found here. In the early 1990s, workers at the
National Gypsum quarry near Stewiacke (previous claim to fame:
“Halfway from the North Pole to the Equator!”) uncovered not one
but two mastodons that were about 70,000 years old. Mastodons, like
the modern moose, preferred to hang out in lakes and swamps. Near
Middle River, Cape Breton, an even “younger” mastodon from 30,000
years ago was unearthed. Cuts and scrapings on the bones imply that
the beast was hunted down by men, suggesting that Nova Scotia was
inhabited by tribes of hunters even then. Mastodons became extinct
here about 10,000 years ago.

   
The ice may have been disastrous to plants and animals, but
it allowed for an ice bridge to form across the Bering Strait, far
away from Nova Scotia on the western fringe of Alaska. Migrating
across this bridge came bison, moose, caribou and musk oxen,
creatures most suited to cold climates who tended to continue
moving east instead of south to warmer climes. Eventually they
found their way to this far coast.

   
Other animals found here after the ice ages included
white-tailed deer, black bear, beavers and ermine, to name a few.
All still exist here today.

   
Humans had also crossed the Bering ice bridge, travelling
throughout North America, retreating southward as the glaciers
advanced, but moving back north when the land opened up. These
peoples crossed over from Asia 13,000 years ago and their children
began to move south along a kind of corridor that led them onto the
Great Plains. Within 2,000 years they had settled all over North
America, including as far away as Nova Scotia. They travelled by
land and when possible by water. The fragmented remains of a very
early settlement is located near Debert. There, these early Nova
Scotians sustained themselves on caribou herds. Debert, the site of
one of the earliest human settlements here, seemed destined to be
the location of a final enclave of humanity had we not all survived
the Cold War. In the 1960s, the Nova Scotia government built a
massive underground bunker ethere to shelter the premier and a
select band of men and women to keep civilization going should
there be an all-out nuclear war. Had the bunker ever been put to
use, the surviving politicians and bureaucrats would have emerged
into a decimated Debert landscape, harsher than anything known by
the Paleo-Indians who first came here.

   
Those earliest of settlers would have lived in animal-skin
tents upon a tundra in a climate still chilled by receding
glaciers. They hunted the mastodon and caribou with sharp
stone-tipped spears. Other stone tools were used for preparing
hides and chipping away at bone and wood.

   
Traces of human presence are absent between 10,000 and 5,000
years ago, probably due to rising sea levels and an unkind
environment. For the following thousand or so years, human
settlement again appeared along the coas ts, where people fished
from the sea and the rivers and hunted beaver, moose and deer. We
don’t know a lot about these times, but spears and grooved axes,
scrapers and knives have been found. In the period between 3,500
and 2,500 years ago, tools must have been very important not only
for a livelihood but as part of one’s identity. When you died, you
were buried with your tools and painted in red ochre as part of
your preparation to enter the spirit world.