Canada's Coastline

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.

Canadian Lakes

 https://books2read.com/Romancing-the-Klondike

https://www.bookswelove.com/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

Canadian Lakes

 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 about 20% of the world’s freshwater. It also shares the world’s largest body of freshwater-the Great Lakes-with the United States. Lake Superior, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, are divided by the border while Lake Michigan is totally in the United States.

Nearly 14% of the world’s lakes over 500 sq km (193.05 sq mi) are within Canada’s borders. The largest lake totally within the country is Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. It is the 4^th largest in North America and the 9^th largest in the world. The name comes from the Chipewyan word satudene which means ‘grizzly bear water people’.

Great Slave Lake, also in the Northwest Territories is the second largest freshwater lake in Canada and the 10^th largest on the Earth. With a depth of 614 metres (2,014 ft) it is the deepest lake in North America. It was named for the Dene, the first nation’s people who were called Slavey by the Cree first nations.

Lake Winnipeg, in Manitoba, is Canada’s third largest freshwater lake and has the largest watershed (the rivers that drain into a lake plus all the land with streams that drain into those rivers) in Canada. Its watershed is about 982,900 square kilometres (379,500 square miles) which is about 40 times its size. This ratio is the biggest of any other large lake in the world. Waters flow into Lake Winnipeg from the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario and from the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Montana making it the 11^th largest freshwater lake in the world.

Lake Athabasca sits on the northern border of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan with 26% in Alberta and 74% in Saskatchewan. It is the fourth largest lake totally in Canada and waters from it flow northward through the Slave and Mackenzie river systems to the Arctic Ocean.

It is estimated that there are about 2 million lakes of various sizes in Canada and they make up about 9% of the country’s mass. This means that 891,163 square kilometres (344,080 sq mi) of Canada’s total area of 9.985 million square kilometres (3.8 million sq mi) is covered by freshwater.