New Brunswick Is Hiding Something Most Canadians Never Notice

Under the farms at Dorchester you could drill through nearly a kilometre of solid salt. The Mactaquac Dam has grown nine to twelve inches because of the rock it was made from. And the sea at Parlee Beach runs about eight degrees warmer than the Bay of Fundy an hour away. Thirty clues about New Brunswick, counted down from the beach to the one buried hole under a third of the province that explains all of them. What's beneath YOUR town? Personalized 15-page report — the rock, the name, the vanished places, your town's oldest map → https://hiddenprovinces.com The Confederation Bridge standing in water shallow enough to freeze. The land bridge people once walked to Prince Edward Island. Kouchibouguac and the family that refused to leave. Miramichi sandstone in the Prime Minister's office building and Albert County stone in Central Park. The Fern Ledges that fooled geologists for fifty years and the reptile tracks that turned out not to be reptiles. Coal from Grand Lake in Boston in the 1600s. A kilometre of salt under Dorchester, gypsum at Hillsborough, salt springs at Plumweseep, and the potash mines at Penobsquis and Picadilly, where a $2.2 billion mine ran for little more than a year. Gas under Moncton since 1909, a brine disposal well that became the McCully gas field, and the black rock called albertite that lit Boston's street lamps, put Abraham Gesner in a courtroom, and gave the world kerosene. A volcano under Mount Pleasant, the Brunswick zinc mine, the 1982 Miramichi earthquake, and a dam fighting the rock it was poured from. All of it traces back to the Maritimes Basin, a hole that sank and filled for ninety million years and was then worn flat and half drowned, which is why the strait is shallow and warm. Sources include the Canadian Encyclopedia, Tourism New Brunswick, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Parks Canada, the Government of New Brunswick (Natural Resources and Energy Development), Natural Resources Canada, the Geological Survey of Canada, the New Brunswick Museum, the Albert County Museum, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Atlantic Geology, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, Gibling et al. (2008) on the Maritimes Basin, Marie Stopes (GSC Memoir 41, 1914), NB Power, MIT News, CBC News, CTV News and the Canadian Mining Journal. Where sources disagree, on the flooding of the land bridge, the first coal shipments and the potash figures, the narration gives both. Subscribe to The Hidden Provinces — beneath the map.