Marq de Villiers

This is what happens when you tell the North Atlantic Ocean to go pound sand.


Sable Island is the narrow 30-mile long exposed part of an large sandbank, sticking out of the ocean about 110 miles east of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is the home of a couple of Canadian coastguards, about 100 semiwild horses, a couple of enzooic insects, a few pods of seals, some hardy plant life, and whatever the wind blows in or the waves wash up. This last includes over 500 shipwrecks, which eerily disappear and reappear into the dunes. The authors attempt to explain the geology, history, flora, fauna and politics of the island; they do an adequate job, but that’s it. The book feels like a magazine a article treated with growth hormone; enough to be interesting but never quite enough of what you want to know.


One section that raised some mental flags was the description of two shells found on the island beaches; a scallop Argopecten irradians and an oyster Crassostrea virginica. The authors make the point that both species are locally extinct, but that they “...thrived in Sable’s lagoons and surrounding waters when temperatures rose after the Ice Age receded.” What bothers me here is while scallops can swim (sort of) and thus have a chance to avoid burial by shifting sands, oysters permanently attach to something and are thus really unlikely to find in an environment like the Sable Island sand bank. Were the shells carried in by currents from elsewhere? Was there a lot more hard ground and less sand in the area? I’ll have to check that out.


Good for an afternoon’s read, not for deep study.… (més)