Grand Manan. Grand Manan Island is a Canadian island, and the largest of the Fundy Islands in the Bay of Fundy. It is the primary island in the Grand Manan Archipelago, sitting at the boundary between the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of Maine on the Atlantic coast. Grand Manan is jurisdictionally part of Charlotte County in the province of New Brunswick. The island lends its name to Grand Manan Parish and the Village of Grand Manan, which has an elected mayor and council; the village includes all of the parish except White Head Island. As of 2016, the village had a population of 2,360. Grand Manan rests in the midwestern end of the Bay of Fundy, a body of water between the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and home to some of the most extreme tides in the world. It is 32 kilometres south of Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick. The point on the mainland closest to the island is in Washington County, Maine, near the town of Lubec, the easternmost point of the continental United States. Grand Manan is 15 km from Maine across the Grand Manan Channel. Grand Manan is 34 km long and has a maximum width of 18 km with an area of 137 square kilometres. The vast majority of Grand Manan residents live on the eastern side of the island. Due to limited access, 91-metre cliffs, and high winds, the western side of the island is not residentially developed, although it does feature wind-power ventures and camps at Dark Harbour, a small community and get-away destination for islanders. Grand Manan has a network of trails for all-terrain vehicles, hiking, mountain biking, nature walks, and presents a challenging landscape for jogging. There are a number of freshwater ponds, lakes and beaches that are prime locations for sunbathing, beachcombing, and picnics. Other interesting finds on Grand Manan are magnetic sand, and The Hole-In-The Wall located in Whale Cove in the village of North Head. Anchorage Provincial Park can be found on the island's southeastern coast between the communities of Grand Harbour and Seal Cove. White Head Island, Gull Rock, Machias Seal Island, and North Rock are part of the larger Grand Manan archipelago. The latter two are about 15 kilometres southwest of Grand Manan Island. Both Machias Seal Island and North Rock are claimed by both Canada and the United States. For administrative purposes, they form the most southerly part of New Brunswick. Machias Seal Island also houses the province's last remaining staffed lighthouse. The light has been in continuous operation since 1832. The post of lighthouse-keeper was withdrawn for cost-saving reasons in the 1990s, but soon reinstated to provide a human demonstration of national sovereignty. Research is conducted on the island by the Atlantic Cooperative Wildlife Ecology Research Network at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. The municipal government of the island consists of an elected mayor and village council. In 1995, the settlements of North Head, Castalia, Woodwards Cove, Grand Harbour, and Seal Cove were amalgamated into the Village of Grand Manan. North Head, Grand Harbour, and Seal Cove had previously been villages, while Castalia and Woodwards Cove had been governed as local service districts. The new governing body came into effect on January 1, 1996. Grand Manan has a split personality regarding its geology. The western ⅔ of the island shows thick lava flows of Late Triassic age, which appear little changed from when they cooled around 201 million years ago. They are part of a massive flood basalt that underlies most of the Bay of Fundy, although the Grand Manan Basalt was later separated into its own rift basin by block faulting. The Fundy basalts are themselves only a small portion of the enormous Central Atlantic Magmatic Province or CAMP, which was formed in a volcanic event preceding the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea in Early Jurassic time. These lava flows also crop out along the western shores of Nova Scotia, where they are known as the North Mountain Basalt. Both there and on Grand Manan Island, many interesting minerals have filled the cracks and bubbles left by gases boiling out of the cooling lavas. They include zeolite minerals such as chabazite, mesolite, stilbite, and heulandite, plus attractive quartz-related amethyst, agate, jasper, and many others. Good collecting areas include Seven Days Work, Indian Beach, and Bradford Cove. A few meters of siltstone are exposed under the basalt along the western shoreline, which by analogy with the Blomidon Formation in Nova Scotia must include the Triassic-Jurassic boundary.
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