Ottawa Is Hiding Something Nobody Talks About

In Pink Lake, in the hills above Ottawa, a sea fish has lived cut off from the ocean for about eleven thousand years. Old beaches sit 220 metres above sea level on the slopes around the city. And in June 2010, Ottawa felt the strongest shaking on record in its history. Twenty-five clues from the Ottawa Valley, counted down to one break in the Earth's crust, with the capital built on its sunken floor. What's beneath YOUR town? Personalized 15-page report — the rock, the name, the vanished places, your town's oldest map → https://hiddenprovinces.com Capelin fossils in the clay of Green's Creek. The Champlain Sea that flooded the valley past Pembroke. Sand dunes hidden in a Nepean pine forest and a marble cave you can wade through in Gatineau Park. A river that once carried the upper Great Lakes to the Atlantic, and the abandoned channel that became Mer Bleue. Leda clay that can turn to liquid, the prehistoric earthquakes that set whole hillsides flowing, and the Val-des-Bois quake of 2010. The straight reach at Deep River, the Rideau and Chaudière falls as Champlain saw them in 1613, and the broken rock at Hog's Back where the Gloucester Fault shows itself. Stromatolites under the Champlain Bridge, raindrop prints in Kanata sandstone, the faulted limestone under Parliament Hill, billion-year-old mountain roots in the Gatineau Hills and the Carp Ridge, the Eardley Escarpment and the Bonnechere Caves. All of it sits inside the Ottawa-Bonnechere Graben, a rift valley where ancient North America began to tear apart more than half a billion years ago and then stopped. Sources include the Geological Survey of Canada (Geoscape Ottawa-Gatineau, Open Files 8013 and 8539), Natural Resources Canada / Earthquakes Canada, the United States Geological Survey, the National Capital Commission, the Ottawa-Gatineau Geoheritage Project, the Canadian Encyclopedia, Carleton University Department of Earth Sciences, the Canadian Museum of Nature, the Canadian Museum of History (Champlain's Voyages), Brooks (2013, Quaternary Research), Aylsworth and Lawrence (2003), Geoenvironmental Disasters (2020), Kumarapeli (1981), Marshall (1965, McMaster University) and the Friends of Oiseau Rock. Where sources disagree, on the age of the graben, the depth of the Deep River reach and the size of the prehistoric earthquakes, the narration gives both figures. Subscribe to The Hidden Provinces — beneath the map.