About the figures

Autray is an independent site about Canada as physical geography: the processes that made the ground, and the places where those processes are still legible in it.

What an entry is

Every entry is one place, located, and the process that made it. That is the whole editorial rule. An entry names the place, gives its position where a position means anything, names the process, and stops. There are no itineraries here and nothing addressed to somebody planning a trip.

Figures

Every measurement on this site is either attributed to the body that made it or marked as disputed. Tidal ranges come from the Canadian Hydrographic Service; uplift rates from Natural Resources Canada geodetic records; ages from published radiometric determinations. Where a number is a rhetorical comparison rather than a measurement — the volume of a Fundy tide against the world’s rivers, for instance — the entry says so rather than repeating it as a fact.

Tides, shield rock, river canyons and the fossil grounds at Yoho and Mistaken Point. The height of Virginia Falls is published between roughly ninety and ninety-eight metres depending on where the lip and the plunge pool are taken; the Burgess Shale is dated between roughly 505 and 510 million years depending on the horizon sampled. Neither disagreement is a problem to be resolved by picking one figure.

Names

Where the ground is the territory of a First Nation or an Inuit community, the nation is named, and the community’s own name for the place leads where that is the documented usage: Náįlįcho for the fall on the South Nahanni, Naha Dehé for the river. The Burgess Shale sits in Yoho National Park, in the territory of the Ktunaxa and Secwépemc Nations. The Shubenacadie bore runs through Mi’kmaq territory and was a working feature of that landscape long before it was a studied one.

Photographs and drawings

Photographs are credited where a credit exists. Diagrams are drawn rather than photographed and are labelled as such; vertical scales in them are exaggerated where the alternative is an unreadable diagram, and the caption says so. Nothing on this site is an icon standing in for a photograph of a place.

Start with the register, or with the Bay of Fundy.