Grand Banks

(geography) Banks off southeastern Newfoundland, important for cod fishing.

For more information on Grand Banks, visit Britannica.com.

Several parts of the continental shelf off the eastern coast of North America lie under less than six hundred feet of water. Covering over fifty thousand square miles, Newfoundland's Grand Banks is the most extensive of these areas. Here, conditions favor the growth of phytoplankton, minute organisms which are the first link in a food chain that includes a small fish known as capelin, northern cod, and humans. In the spring, the cod pursue the capelin when they move close to the coast to spawn. It is here, inshore, that people have been fishing for cod for the longest time. Whether aboriginal Newfoundlanders, who first arrived five thousand years ago, fished for cod is unclear. According to a 1529 account, the Beothuks did not do so. Possibly on the basis of information dating from the earlier Viking voyages to Newfoundland and points beyond around A.D. 1000, English and Portuguese vessels seem to have happened upon these fishing grounds even before the official discoverer of Newfoundland, John Cabot, noted their fabulous abundance in 1497. Soon, fishers and merchants from the European Atlantic kingdoms had developed a seasonal inshore fishery producing for southern European markets. In this "dry" fishery, crews split, salted, and dried the cod on shore over the summer before returning to Europe. Beginning around 1550, the French pioneered the "wet" or "green" fishery on the Banks proper, heavily salting the cod on board and returning home directly. By the 1570s, hundreds of vessels and thousands of men were active in the two fisheries.

In the seventeenth century, some of the French and English who now dominated the fishery began wintering in Newfoundland. French residents were forced to leave the island in the eighteenth century, although the French migrant fishery continued in northern Newfoundland. By 1815, English-speaking Newfoundlanders had largely replaced English migrant fishers inshore. Offshore, schooners based in New England and Newfoundland had begun to make inroads on the Europeans vessels' share of the catch. By the later nineteenth century, the Europeans were generally French, and Brazil had joined Europe and the Caribbean as a major market. Pressure on the resource would increase over the long term. But it was no doubt twentieth-century technology, especially the voracious factory-freezer ship introduced in the 1950s, that put it at risk. Europeans, some of them from as far away as Russia, returned in force to the Banks and even inshore in the post–World War II period, catching unprecedented quantities of an already dwindling fish stock. Catches of cod peaked in the late 1960s. Experts continue to weigh the long-term effects of climatic change on cod populations, but they now agree that overfishing was the primary factor in the decline of the inshore and Banks fisheries. International fisheries organizations and even the Canadian government, which imposed a two-hundred-mile management zone covering most of the Grand Banks in 1977, were slow to act decisively to conserve the resource. By 1992, the stock was so depleted that Canada was forced to close its Grand Banks fishery, putting thousands out of work. Reopened in the late 1990s, the cod fishery operates in the early twenty-first century on a severely reduced scale. Recovery, if it happens at all, will take decades. Meanwhile, in 1997, a consortium of companies began tapping another of the Banks' riches, the vast Hibernia oil field, discovered in 1979.

Bibliography

Gentilcore, R. Louis, ed. Historical Atlas of Canada. Vol. 2, The Land Transformed, 1800–1891. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

Harris, Michael. Lament for an Ocean: The Collapse of the Atlantic Cod Fishery. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998.

Historical Atlas of Canada. Vol.1, From the Beginning to 1800. Vol. 2, The Land Transformed, 1800–1891. Vol. 3, Addressing the Twentieth Century, 1891–1961. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987, 1990, 1993.

Marshall, Ingeborg. A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996.

Vickers, Daniel. Farmers and Fishermen. Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Wright, Miriam. A Fishery for Modern Times: The State and the Industrialization of the Newfoundland Fishery, 1934–1968. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Map showing the Grand Banks

The Grand Banks of Newfoundland are a group of underwater plateaus southeast of Newfoundland on the North American continental shelf. These areas are relatively shallow, ranging from 80 to 330 feet (24–100 m) in depth. The cold Labrador Current mixes with the warm waters of the Gulf Stream here.

The mixing of these waters and the shape of the ocean bottom lifts nutrients to the surface. These conditions helped to create one of the richest fishing grounds in the world. Fish species include Atlantic cod, haddock, and capelin. Shellfish include scallop and lobster. The area also supports large colonies of sea birds such as Northern Gannets, shearwaters, and sea ducks and various sea mammals such as seals, dolphins, and whales.

In addition to the effects on nutrients, the mixing of the cold and warm currents often causes fog in the area.

Contents 1 History 2 Research 3 Culture 4 See also 5 External links

History

Historic map including the Grand Banks.

Several navigators, including Basque fishermen, are claimed to have fished these waters in the 15th century.^{[citation needed]} In the 15th century some texts refer to a land called Bacalao, the land of the codfish, which is possibly Newfoundland. However, it was not until John Cabot reached the New World in 1497 that the existence of these fishing grounds became generally known in Europe. Ships from France, Spain, Portugal, and England came to fish these waters. These fish stocks were also important for the early economies of eastern Canada and New England.

On 18 November 1929, a major earthquake (known as the 1929 Grand Banks earthquake) on the southwestern part of the Grand Banks bordering the Laurentian Channel caused an underwater landslide which resulted in extensive damage to transatlantic cables and generated a rare Atlantic tsunami that struck the south coast of Newfoundland and eastern Cape Breton Island claiming 28 lives in the Burin Peninsula.

Technological advances in fishing such as large factory ships and sonar, as well as geopolitical disputes over territorial sea and exclusive economic zone (EEZ) boundaries, have led to overfishing and a serious decline in the fish stocks of the Grand Banks from around 1990. The fishery-based economy of Newfoundland and Labrador has been in a severe crisis since the 1990s. Canada's EEZ currently occupies the majority of the Grand Banks except for the lucrative "nose" (eastern extremity, near the Flemish Cap) and "tail" (southern extremity) of the fishing bank. However, the Treaty of Paris (1783) gave the United States shared rights to fish in these waters - however, that section of the Treaty of Paris is no longer in force.

Research

Canada is currently performing the hydrographic and geological surveys necessary for claiming the entire continental shelf off eastern Canada, under the auspices of the latest United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Once this aspect of UNCLOS is ratified, Canada will presumably control these remaining parts of Grand Banks which are outside of its EEZ jurisdiction.

Petroleum reserves have also been discovered and a number of oil fields are under development in this region, most notably the Hibernia, Terra Nova, and White Rose projects; the harsh environment on the Grand Banks also led to the Ocean Ranger disaster.

Culture

Semi-fictional depictions of fishermen working on the Grand Banks can be found in Sebastian Junger's novel The Perfect Storm (1997) and in Rudyard Kipling's novel Captains Courageous (1897).

See also

• Continental shelf
• Turbot War
• Banks dory

External links

• Overfishing:The Grand Banks and the Flemish Cap^{[dead link]}
• Government response to the standing committee on fisheries and oceans' tenth report
• Watch Cries from the Deep — a Jacques Cousteau documentary on the Grand Banks]

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Coordinates: 45°14′13″N 50°59′21.2″W / 45.23694°N 50.989222°W / 45.23694; -50.989222

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