Guarding the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, Newfoundland, in combination with Labrador, is Canada's easternmost Province. Over the next week, my wife and I will be exploring this island for the first time and are looking forward to witnessing its stark beauty, abundant wildlife and varied landscape.
Newfoundland has an interesting geologic history. Its eastern third was once part of the Eurasian Plate while its western mountains are an extension of the Northern Appalachians; between these geologic regions is an uplift of ancient marine sediments, once the floor of the Iapetus Ocean. This ocean closed as Earth's continents merged into Pangea (during the Permian Period) and its crust was forced upward and over the junction of the North American and European land masses. When the Atlantic Ocean opened, it rifted to the east of this old suture line, wrenching westernmost Europe from its former Plate and attaching it to the North American Plate. Today, Newfoundland's stratified geology reflects the sequence of those tectonic events.
The rugged landscape of Newfoundland, molded by Pleistocene glaciers and the harsh, North Atlantic climate, is famous for its rocky coasts, icebergs, scenic fiords and tiaga ecosystems. Naturalists are also drawn to the island by its large colonies of sea birds and its varied population of whales. Newfoundland is home to the largest black bears on the Continent and to large herds of caribou and moose; these latter herbivores were introduced in the early 1900s and the island now harbors the greatest concentration of moose in North America.
