Burntcoat Head Park. Burntcoat Head Park is on the coast of the Bay of Fundy in Mi’Kmaq territory and the District of Sipekne’katik, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people. It is always important to recognize such facts and the park did exactly that.
It also claims to be the exact site of the highest tides in the world. The Bay of Fundy of which it is a part claims to have the highest tides and it is because of this area. And it was also home to a lovely islet just a short walk away down to the beach.
The Guinness Book of World Records (1975) declared that Burntcoat had the highest tides in the world: “The greatest tides in the world occur in the Bay of Fundy…. Burntcoat Head in the Minas Basin, Nova Scotia, has the greatest mean spring range with 14.5 metres (47.5 feet) and an extreme range of 16.3 metres (53.5 feet).” That is good enough for me, though I admit there is some controversy about which tides are actually the biggest. The National Geographic made a similar claim in its August 1957 magazine: “The famous tides of the Bay of Fundy move with deceptive quiet. Sheltered from the open sea, they ebb and flood to a recorded range unequal in the rest of the world.”
Twice each day the tides rise and fall in the Bay of Fundy and cause 60 billion tonnes of water to flow in and out of the Bay of Fundy each day! That is incredible when you stop to think about it. The average tide in the bay is 47.5 ft high and the highest is 53.6 ft.
Like most coastal tides, Burntcoat Head experiences two high tides and two low tides each day. The Bay of Fundy fills and empties with approximately 160 billion tonnes of water twice a day. On average it takes 6 hours and 13 minutes between high and low tide. As soon as the tide has reached its lowest or highest point, it will change directions, and either begin to come to shore or flow back out. The timing of the tides changes by approximately by one hour daily. Spring tides happen twice per month when the Sun, Moon, and Earth are aligned. During this alignment, the tides raise higher than average. Neap tides occur during the first and third quarter moon. During this time the high tide heights are lower than average.
There was also a lighthouse here but it was a bit of a dud though it had an interesting history. The first lighthouse was built in 1858, before Confederation on land that later was transformed into an island. The lighthouse had 5 oil lamps with reflectors that the keepers had to clean every day! The narrow “neck” of land on which it was built connected it to the mainland until that neck was eroded into oblivion. The power of the sea, unlike the power of men and women, is relentless. After that the people who worked on the lighthouse had to climb up bank of the beach by means of a ladder.
In 1979 a man and his son, George and Sandy Hyrnewich, searching the beach found a fossil of a creature that had never been discovered or identified before. It was the skull of a reptile that was 20 cm long and came from the late Triassic period more than 220 million years ago. That was before there were any dinosaurs on the planet. It is now called, appropriately, Teraterpeton Hyrnewich. The first part of the name means “wonderful creeping thing” in Latin and the second part is of course their name. As erosion in the Bay of Fundy continues, other strange fossils may be found.
The Bay of Fundy originated when the world’s continents were all joined as one in what scientists now called the supercontinent Pangaea, which means one earth, 230 million years ago, about the time the wonderful creeping thing was creeping. Pangaea started to break apart. At that time a very large rift valley started to form, where the Bay of Fundy is now found. Braided rivers probably blown through the region and hot dry winds blew sand into dunes that today form the red sandstone that is so visible today in Burntcoat and other places in Nova Scotia.