The tide rises and falls by up to about sixteen metres twice a day because the bay's resonant period nearly matches the tide's and the water sloshes like a bath.
Every entry is one place, located, and the process that made it.
No figure appears here without a source. Where published measurements disagree, the entry carries the range and says why. The whole register is one page.
Above the treeline in Yoho, two people are splitting mudstone that is about 508 million years old. The fossils in it are films a few molecules thick: guts, gills, eyes and limbs of animals that had no hard parts at all, buried fast enough by a mud slide that nothing could decay them.
Canada holds more lake surface than any other country, and the reason is not rainfall. Ice scraped a landscape of hard rock clean of its sediment, left millions of closed hollows, and melted ten thousand years ago — which is not long enough for them to fill or drain.
The river was there before the mountains, and cut down as they rose. It drops roughly twice the height of Niagara into the canyon it made.
A boulder of the wrong rock, five hundred kilometres from its parent outcrop, set down on whatever surface lay under the ice when it melted.
Seventeen entries in all. The register lists every one with its position and its process.
Everything on this site filed by the age of the thing it describes. The same drawn column runs at three sizes here: as the mark beside the masthead, as the rule between sections, and at full size as the diagram below.
Vertical scale is not linear — the Precambrian would otherwise take the whole page. Hatching follows survey-memoir convention: dashes for mudstone, chevrons for ash, cross-hatch for shock-melted rock, diagonals for gneiss. How the figures are handled.
Half a country of bare Precambrian rock.
3 entries02Sixteen metres, twice a day.
4 entries03Rivers cutting faster than mountains rise.
3 entries04Soft bodies, half a billion years.
4 entries05What the glaciers left behind.
3 entriesAllSeventeen entries with their coordinates and the process that made each one.
One pageOrganisations whose curiosity about Canada's deep terrain runs as close to the rock as ours does.
Where the largest range is reliably measured, and how a tidal range is measured at all. The 16.3-metre figure is a greatest observed range: one exceptional high tide paired with one exceptional low.
In Newfoundland, an Ediacaran seafloor community preserved in place under volcanic ash, older than the Burgess Shale.
Burntcoat Head · 16.3 mA greatest observed range, not a mean. The mean range at the same station is lower, and still the largest gauged anywhere.
Mistaken Point · 565 MaRadiometric dating of the ash puts the main surfaces at roughly 565 million years; the wider range quoted for the site’s assemblages is 560–575.
Virginia Falls · ~90 mPublished heights vary with where the lip and the plunge pool are taken. Roughly twice Niagara is the safe comparison.
The Bay of Fundy · volumesThe figure comparing one tide to the world’s rivers conveys scale rather than precision. The order of magnitude, 100 billion tonnes a cycle, is the usable number.
