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Cargando... Sable Island: The Strange Origins and Curious History of a Dune Adrift in the Atlantic (2004)por Marq De Villiers, Sheila Hirtle (Autor)
  
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Dotted with greenery and wild horses, orchids and Ipswich sparrows, Sable Island is considered one of the great graveyards of the North Atlantic. It sits out there in the ocean’s steel-gray roil on the edge of the continental shelf. Who would ever suspect that there would be a shape-shifting island in this vastness, with submerged bars ready to trap and topple a ship? Very few, at least at first, explain the authors in their glinting profile. The island’s distant past is as foggy as its summer weather; Basque sailors may have been there, maybe Vikings, perhaps an Irish monk in a coracle. De Villiers and Hirtle provide a sweet little geological history of the place, a child of glacial retreat, and detail the island’s special location “in the center of this vortex, this complex system of currents, gyres, and rings” that give it stability but also may spell its doom by pushing it into the abyssal gully to the east.
Sable Island lies off Canada’s Nova Scotian coast. A shape-shifting ghost of an island, it is in fact more a sandbar, adrift in the Atlantic, wandering to the east or west with the storms that so frequently batter it – but somehow never tipping over the nearby Continental Shelf. The bane of sailors for many generations, it declines to stay exactly where it is on the sea charts, and is so low that it can often not be seen until an unfortunate ship is almost in its clutches. As a result, its beaches have been littered over the years by hundreds of shipwrecks. These have attracted both the notorious “wreckers,” who scavenged for whatever they could “salvage,” and were suspected of occasionally doing away with any witnesses who had the temerity to survive, and the employees of the Humane Establishment, set up for the rescue of shipwreck victims. Anchored roughly by tough vegetation, surprisingly supplied with fresh water in the middle of salt, inhabited by hardy wild horses descended from Acadian ponies left on the island in 1756, Sable is an amazing place, and the authors have done it justice in this engaging and often lyrical book. From the Hardcover edition. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)971.6History and Geography North America Canada Nova Scotia and AcadiaClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (3.4)
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Sable Island is the narrow 30-mile long exposed part of an large sandbank, sticking out of the ocean about 110 miles east of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is the home of a couple of Canadian coastguards, about 100 semiwild horses, a couple of enzooic insects, a few pods of seals, some hardy plant life, and whatever the wind blows in or the waves wash up. This last includes over 500 shipwrecks, which eerily disappear and reappear into the dunes. The authors attempt to explain the geology, history, flora, fauna and politics of the island; they do an adequate job, but that’s it. The book feels like a magazine a article treated with growth hormone; enough to be interesting but never quite enough of what you want to know.
One section that raised some mental flags was the description of two shells found on the island beaches; a scallop Argopecten irradians and an oyster Crassostrea virginica. The authors make the point that both species are locally extinct, but that they “...thrived in Sable’s lagoons and surrounding waters when temperatures rose after the Ice Age receded.” What bothers me here is while scallops can swim (sort of) and thus have a chance to avoid burial by shifting sands, oysters permanently attach to something and are thus really unlikely to find in an environment like the Sable Island sand bank. Were the shells carried in by currents from elsewhere? Was there a lot more hard ground and less sand in the area? I’ll have to check that out.
Good for an afternoon’s read, not for deep study. (