https://books2read.com/Romancing-the-Klondike
https://books2read.com/Rushing-the-Klondike
https://www.bookswelove.com/donaldson-yarmey-joan/
Canada’s Coastline
I am a Canadian and all my mystery, historical, romance, and young
adult novels are set in Canada. Canada is the second largest country in the
world and has the world’s longest coastline. It is 243,792 km (151,485.326 mi in
length and borders on the North Pacific, Arctic, and North Atlantic Oceans and
includes the coasts of Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and Cape Breton
island, as well as, thousands of off-shore islands. The next closest country is
Indonesia with 54,716 km (33,999 mi). The sovereign country of Monaco has 5.6
km (3.5 mi) of coastline.
Part of Canada’s coastline encompasses Hudson Bay which, even
though it is saltwater, is sometimes considered a marginal sea of the Arctic
Ocean. While politically it is considered part of Nunavut, it borders on
Ontario, Manitoba, Quebec, and Nunavut. Hudson Bay is famous for the fur trade
between Europeans and Indigenous peoples from the 1600s to the 1900s.
Canada has ten provinces and three territories. Two of the
provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, are land locked. The others plus the
territories all have some part of their coast on saltwater. The province of
British Columbia has the most with 25,725 km (15,985 mi) on the Pacific Ocean,
while the Yukon Territory has only 343 km (213 mi) along the Arctic Ocean.
The government of Canada has set aside five key ecosystems of
Canada’s coastline as Large Ocean Management Areas (LOMA) for conservation,
planning, and management. The Pacific North Coast comprises one-quarter of the
Canadian Pacific ocean waters. This area is home to sea lions, dolphins, seals,
porpoises, and twenty-seven different whale species. It is also the habitat of 80%
of the global population of Cassin’s Auklet plus a number of other seabirds.
The glass sponge reef along the coast dates back 9,000 years.
The people around the Eastern Scotian shelf rely on fishing and
petroleum exploration for their livelihood to the detriment of the region and
the number of marine animals that live there. LOMA is trying to improve the
area. Although, shore around the Placentia Bay area off the coast of Newfound
and Labrador is degrading due to
economic development, it is still the habitat for 49 bird species, 14 marine
animal species, and 23 fish species. There are also a number of plant species.
The Beaufort Sea is a marginal sea (a division of water separated
from an ocean by islands, peninsulas, or archipelagos) in the Arctic Ocean off
the shore of the Yukon and Northwest Territories. This LOMA is a complex a marine
system because of the short summer free of ice, the freshwater flowing into the
sea during the spring and summer and the increased dropping of sediment. It has
been an important area for humans who have hunted and fished for centuries. Six
communities oversea the management of the LOMA and by doing so are able to pass
on their harvesting skills to future generations.
The fifth LOMA protected area is the Gulf of St Lawrence which
sits at the mouth of the St Lawrence River and covers 155,000 sq km (60,000 sq
mi). Some of the species that inhabit the waters are Greenland shark, the St.
Lawrence beluga, giant whales, seals, tiny pink crustaceans called krill that
are near the bottom of the food chain, sea ducks, and geese. It is a very
productive and diverse estuary along the coasts of Quebec, New Brunswick,
Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfound land and Labrador.
