NARRATOR: In Nova Scotia, Canada,
nature's most powerful forces
work to balance the rugged coastline,
shaping it over millennia.
When the tides roll out,
they reveal a beach buffet for weary travelers
on epic migrations.
When the tides roll in,
they bring alien attacks from little green invaders.
The land works to defend,
the sea works to conquer,
and where they hang in the wild balance,
is The Living Beach.
NARRATOR: Almost all of Nova Scotia
is a beach.
It's a peninsula,
clinging to the eastern edge of North America
by just a thin strip of land,
surrounded on all sides by the harsh Atlantic sea.
Drive for an hour here, in any direction,
and you'll reach the beach,
guaranteed.
But there's more going on at this ocean playground
than simple "play",
Because it's so geographically narrow,
Nova Scotia almost resembles a balance-beam,
with a divergent coastline to either side,
To the west, rocks and mud,
to the east, grasses and sand.
At either edge,
Nova Scotia proves that any beach
is built from raw forces in opposition,
But that balance between those forces
is necessary, if life is to thrive.
Nowhere is there a better example
of this high-contrast ecosystem
than the Bay of Fundy, on the western shore.
NARRATOR: Every 13 hours,
the Bay of Fundy performs a feat
that puts it into the Guinness Book of World Records.
The sea levels here
rise to the height of a four story building,
and then drop away to nothing.
For six-and-a-half hours,
the tides pump into this bay,
and then, for another six-and-a-half,
they pump back out,
like an unstoppable, natural machine.
The total volume of water
involved in this tidal feat, is more than
the flow of every freshwater river
in the world, combined.
NARRATOR: During low tide,
small holes can appear on the muddy beach,
like pock-marking on the surface of the moon.
These holes are from the clams,
or bivalve mollusks
hiding just inches out of sight.
A bivalve mollusk has a double-siphon
it extends from its body,
one to filter through seawater, combing for food,
and the other to spit out that water once it's used.
The hole that this creates on the surface
makes the clam easy to find,
for locals like Alonzo Cormier.
Cormier has been digging for clams
upon these mudflats for 56 years.
CORMIER: I was out there this morning about 5:30
and then, oh I had dug probably about two hours.
Then come back tonight and
whatever I get's whatever I get.
NARRATOR: High tide replenishes, and low tide reveals.
Finding soft-shell clams here
helps to sustain Cormier, as his source of income,
But those clams also sustain shorebirds,
like seagulls, as a source of nourishment.
NARRATOR: Elsewhere along the Bay of Fundy,
different shorebirds also depend on low tide for their survival,
Landing here is critical
for the semipalmated sandpiper,
as a place to rest and to feed.
ABBOTT: What's amazing about shorebirds is
they're a group that shows a lot of diversity.
In Atlantic Canada, we have
mostly sandpipers and plovers.
You have big sandpipers, like the whimbrel,
with the long, down-curved beak.
You have plovers,
that are characterized by a short stubby bill.
And then you have smaller sandpipers,
like the semipalmated sandpiper,
which are roughly sparrow-sized.
NARRATOR: These little birds
make one of the biggest, most incredible migrations
of any animal on Earth.
ABBOTT: So after the breeding season is over,
in the Arctic, for the semipalmated sandpiper,
they are stopping at the Bay of Fundy,
roughly a mid-point on their way south
to their southern wintering area
in Central America and South America.
One of the reasons that shorebirds are so fascinating
is that they must just have a perilous journey
where they do have to
deal with events like weather,
of course then there's predators.
And they need the Bay of Fundy
to stop and feed and rest, in order to fuel up
to finish that migration south.
And that's sometimes called roosting,
where they gather in great numbers, and they roost.
You can think of Bay of Fundy
like a truck-stop is to a trucker on a long-haul.
NARRATOR: Gathering on the Fundy shore,
flocks can range in size from hundreds of thousands of birds,
to an astounding quarter of a million.
In fact, almost 80% of the world's
semipalmated sandpipers will find their way
to the Bay of Fundy in summer.
ABBOTT: The biggest numbers would be moving
through the Bay of Fundy from late July into August.
One of the challenges that semipalmated sandpipers
have when they're on the Bay of Fundy is predators.
Gathering in greater numbers,
it may be less likely that you might get picked off,
so there's certain strategies that the shorebirds have,
and part of that is the flocking behavior.
NARRATOR: At low tide here,
the mudflats can stretch out forever,
a stark and lifeless-seeming landscape.
But scratch the surface, just as the sandpiper does,
and a food-source in humongous numbers is hiding beneath.
The tiny, plentiful mud-shrimp,
only found here,
beneath the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of Maine.
ABBOTT: The semipalmated sandpiper, they need to
put on a lot of weight,
so they're feeding on those delicious mud-shrimp,
and other invertebrates.
NARRATOR: Some stories about the ecology of the beach
are better known than others,
as are some animals.
This mucky creature is very easy to miss,
being approximately only the size
of your pinky fingernail.
It's the humble mud-shrimp,
and it partially holds the mudflats together,
stabilizing the beach
against an endless torrent of Fundy seawater.
The mud-shrimp lives in a u-shaped burrow
of its own creation,
making a kind of chimney pipe to the surface.
The walls of this burrow become hard-packed over time,
as the shrimp repeatedly shoves its habitat into place.
This miniscule cementing effect,
when multiplied by the massive population of shrimp,
ultimately serves to strengthen the whole Fundy mud-plain,
mortaring it, in some measure, against erosion.
But hungry shorebirds don't care about this,
they just want to eat.
They probe into those u-shaped burrows
with their narrow bills,
eager to pluck a mud-shrimp free.
Surf, in the turf.
ABBOTT: These shorebirds have
evolved to know the places that they can rely on
for adequate food resources,
If you think about it from our perspective,
imagine doubling your weight
in order to complete a marathon.
I mean, it just shows you how much fuel they need
in order to do that migration.
So the Bay of Fundy is one of those places.
NARRATOR: Calibrated by nature,
this beach balances mud and shrimp,
shrimp and shorebird,
high tide and low,
But how do the tides here work?
Tides are caused by the sun and the moon,
as their gravities work to pull the ocean back and forth,
almost like it's a yo-yo on a string.
But the shape of the Bay of Fundy
is a second contributing factor,
it becomes narrower and shallower toward the upper bay,
compelling the water to higher and higher beach lines.
As a third factor,
the Bay of Fundy works like a giant bath-basin,
water sloshes from end-to-end within it,
creating a natural wave agitation
that pushes the tides ever-upward.
So when the tide is "in" at the Bay of Fundy,
it's further "in" than anywhere else on earth.
And when it's "out,"
it's further "out" than anywhere else,
NARRATOR: On any beach, the intertidal zone
is the measurable area
which grows and contracts with the tides,
The place covered at high tide
and then uncovered at low.
And at Burntcoat Head in the Bay of Fundy,
that intertidal zone is the tallest of them all.
Salt water floods the banks here daily,
then rushes away again. When it goes,
it steals away the land, a little more each time.
These cliffs are relatively soft sandstone,
easily sheared away by the Fundy Tides.
What's left behind is a steep landscape out of Dr. Seuss,
Trees still tuft from the top of these eroded towers,
locals describe the result as "flower pots".
Another phenomena left behind, when the ocean recedes,
are temporary ponds known as tide pools.
HEBDA: Right now, we're standing in the bottom of the sea.
Well, a tide pool essentially is an area
where the water does not drain away.
Within these pools, we have things growing.
Because the ecosystem is based on things being brought in,
essentially with each tide,
the principal animals that we see around here
tend to be hermit crabs.
NARRATOR: Hermit crabs live inside the shells
of other creatures, primarily sea snails,
and they've been making mobile homes of those shells
for about 66 million years.
HEBDA: In here,
we have things that not only live in the water
and are protected by those rocky edges,
but we've also got organisms that
will bury down in the sand for protection.
Let's see if we can catch one.
Here we have a crab.
Now he can almost reach my fingers,
I'm going to bring him in here.
Let's rinse him off a bit.
Okay, this is called a lady crab.
And you can tell because
it's got this mottling pattern on the back
and you count the number of spines on the fronts,
so, 1 2 3 4 5,
NARRATOR: Lady crabs get their name from their pretty shells.
But it's been said, "Don't mess with the lady",
Lady crabs can be nasty,
and are the species most likely
to pinch a swimmer's toe.
HEBDA: The one beautiful thing about them is
that their claws can reach all the way back underneath,
and so if you pick them up, they can pick you up.
NARRATOR: The lady crab likes to keep itself buried,
often only visible by the eyestalks,
When buried, it lays in wait,
to quickly dart from its hiding place
and snatch an unsuspecting animal
into its claws.
HEBDA: It's quite flat in and around this area,
and the reason is, come spring time,
we get the movement of the ice pans
that have formed during the winter time
and they essentially scrape everything off.
NARRATOR: The tide pools of Burntcoat Head
aren't permanent pools, then,
and so the organisms within them
struggle and reset, yearly.
HEBDA: Everything is scraped off and disappears
and has to start from scratch.
JONES: The intertidal is a really harsh environment,
just because of the continual change.
And the higher up on the shore you go,
the harsher it is,
because of the effect of desiccation.
NARRATOR: Desiccation is just another word for drying out.
Creatures who live here need to be tough.
When the tides abandon them, they become captives
to the sun and wind on the naked beach.
JONES: The further down we go towards low tide,
the less extreme the conditions,
the more species we see.
You may only be exposed for
maybe even a few minutes once a month.
The best kind of tide pools
from the point of view of organisms
are the deep crevices,
overhung with a lot of the big brown seaweeds
that create shade, that keep it cool, keep it moist.
NARRATOR: These are the seasonal pools
that will always be filled with water,
giving the simple organisms there
a fighting chance to take hold,
and to multiply.
A place of permanence,
on an ever-changing beach.
JONES: Most of the creatures that we find here
are kind of small and inconspicuous,
but the more you look,
certainly, y'know, the more they're there.
NARRATOR: This cluster is actually
an entire city's worth of little life,
Seen through a microscope,
thousands of moss animals hide within these chambers.
Also known as "Bryozoa,"
this simple creature reproduces asexually.
In other words, this entire colony
would have started with a single organism,
cloning itself over and over again.
JONES: We never see living moss animals,
except at low tide.
It's always different,
the shore is always, always changing,
This is a unique environment,
because you've got bedrock, you've got sand,
you've got mud, you've got tide pools,
you've got the cobble. You've got it all,
in one small area.
NARRATOR: A dynamic system,
but balanced from the bottom to the top.
At the highest and harshest intertidal zone, however,
life becomes scarce.
JONES: Upper high tidal and above high tide
is called the splash zone.
You may be exposed for all but maybe one day a month.
HEBDA: You're not going to find crabs,
you're not going to find any of the fish.
NARRATOR: Creatures at the splash zone
are the last to be protected by the water,
and the first to be exposed to wind and sun.
It's something very few species can tolerate.
HEBDA: The thing you'll most commonly see,
from the animal point of view,
are gonna be things such as periwinkles,
which basically will be grazing on surfaces.
NARRATOR: Periwinkles are little sea snails,
with a fine, threaded shell.
It's believed that the periwinkle
is foreign to Nova Scotia beaches,
having made its way here in the 19th century,
inadvertently attached to ships.
In that way, history and the beach
have always been conjoined,
And nowhere is this more apparent
than the Bay of Fundy's Joggins Fossil Cliffs.
A treasure trove from our distant, prehistoric past,
It is the world's most complete fossil record
of the late Carboniferous era.
This landscape of ancient rock
holds such outstanding value
that it's been designated
a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
TOUR GUIDE: What we came to see, is this rock
that I'm currently standing on.
BROWN: Roughly for every kilometer
you walk here, is a million years,
ahead or back in time.
As you walk southward on this beach,
you go ahead in time.
As you walk northward on this beach,
you go back in time.
NARRATOR: Trapped within these cliffs,
and scattered along the beach,
are 300 million years of fossils.
BROWN: Every time that tide came in and out,
it was like a treasure hunt.
You could find something new.
NARRATOR: The living creatures
frozen in time here can startle the imagination.
This tiny, modern millipede is actually a relative
to one of the first creatures
to ever crawl this earth.
But its ancestor, Arthropleura,
was larger by an exponential magnitude.
Imagine this wriggling beast,
grown to lengths greater than history's tallest man.
BROWN: This is one whole animal, right?
He's that wide.
That's one set of his legs, and the other set.
NARRATOR: These millipedes were some of the largest
land invertebrates of all time,
with almost no predator.
Fossils like these
rewind us to the place where all
"living beaches" begin.
BROWN: What's special about Joggins
is the fossils here are all in context.
They've never moved.
And that allows the scientists
to study the ecosystems
and how they coexisted at the time.
NARRATOR: In other words, these fossil cliffs
are a wide angle snapshot
of the entire area as it worked eons ago,
the plants, the animals, the entire food chain,
is all frozen in the exact same moment of time.
When everything is in place like this,
scientists call it in situ.
Though everything about the landscape at Joggins Beach
would have looked profoundly different back then.
BROWN: If we were here 300 million years ago,
these mountains would be towering over us.
They were higher than the Rockies;
they were higher than the Himalayas.
NARRATOR: In this time period,
it's believed that Nova Scotia's landmass
would have been fused to the landmass of Morocco,
on the north coast of Africa.
This is the time of the Pangea supercontinent.
BROWN: When Pangea was coming together,
it trapped an ancient sea that was here,
it was called the Windsor Sea.
And it had no inlets, no outlets,
so it evaporated. All that sediment
that was sitting on the top like this
slowly dropped over millions of years
from the weight.
So what you've done is you've taken a record
where you read it vertically,
and moved it like this on its side.
NARRATOR: But our understanding of history
then flipped completely upside down
with the discovery of another fossil at Joggins Beach.
It's here that we find record of
the earliest vertebrate animal,
Hylonomous lyelii, the oldest reptile
known to modern science.
This lizard-like creature
is an evolutionary milestone.
BROWN: And what made it special was
it was the first one that could lay
a terrestrially-adapted egg.
It brought all the nutrients it needed,
everything it needed was in that egg.
And what made it really important then was
Hylonomous could travel,
it didn't have to stay near the water to reproduce.
NARRATOR: Before Hylonomous, the highest life forms
remained only amphibious.
Hylonomous, then, becomes the predecessor
of every dinosaur, every reptile,
every mammal, every human being.
Discovered upon Joggins Beach and Fossil Cliffs,
Hylonomous is the mother of us all.
BROWN: This point, Coal Mine Point,
is where we separated ourselves from the water forever.
NARRATOR: It represents the moment
where we changed the balance,
where we threw ourselves
onto the evolutionary beach,
breaking free from the water,
never looking back.
BROWN: They could go inland
and it went on to conquer all of the super-continent.
NARRATOR: At Joggins Beach, we discovered
where we came from,
in order to better understand
where we might be going,
Game-changing discoveries like this one
finally tipped the balance for natural scientist
Charles Darwin.
BROWN: Darwin said,
That's it, now I have the time period I need
to fit evolution in.
And Darwin wrote "The Origin of Species",
in which Joggins is mentioned twice in that book.
NARRATOR: Darwin's theories developed upon
the idea of survival of the fittest,
that 'nature is red in tooth and claw'.
But what if sometimes, the claw is green?
NARRATOR: Moving from Nova Scotia's muddy west coast
to its sandy east,
a devastating alien invasion
is tipping the scales of nature,
But instead of little green men,
it's little green crabs.
When viewed up close, the European green crab
certainly seems like it could star
in any B-level monster movie,
But even viewed in its proper scale,
this little green crab
is proving to be a big problem.
The female of the species can release up to
185,000 eggs twice a season.
It's adapting into colder North Atlantic water,
expanding its range.
And the critical problem is,
it's eating everything in its path.
The green crab is throwing the beach out of balance,
and is being vilified as one of
the 10 most unwanted species in the World.
Once established in an area,
the green crab is impossible to wipe out,
But one of the beachfront battle lines
being drawn with this invader now
is at Kejimkujik National Park Seaside.
It's a setting both beautiful and remote
MCCARTHY: This is one of the few
last really isolated beaches
left on the East Coast of North America.
I've had scientists ask me
if this was the Bahamas,
when they saw aerial photos of it,
it is so spectacular.
NARRATOR: Kejimkujik Seaside is primarily
composed of two larger estuaries,
one of which is Little Port Joli.
Little Port Joli is then distinguished
by a long sand-spit,
a very narrow, white-sand gateway,
allowing the estuary to flow out
into the great sea.
MCCARTHY: This is about a 125 hectare estuary here.
You have the full transition from freshwater
to saltwater species, as you go down it
towards the ocean.
It's all so spectacular to experience,
because it's different every day.
And it's always changing.
NARRATOR: But some changes are not for the better,
More than 50% of commercial marine species
living in this estuary, fish, mollusks and more,
make nurseries of the thick eelgrass beds
that tangle in the water.
Those marine species, in turn, then feed migrating birds,
and so on up the food chain.
The eelgrass needs to remain healthy,
like strips of verdant green ribbon,
stabilizing the estuary,
for the whole food chain to remain healthy.
MCCARTHY: Eelgrass is vital to these ecosystems,
it's sort of the driver,
it's the motor that makes everything go.
It's really important because of
the diversity of animals, and structure that it provides.
NARRATOR: But from the shores of the estuary,
a crisis is growing more and more apparent,
damaged and dying water-grass.
MCCARTHY: We realized that the eelgrass
was disappearing very quickly,
Above the surface, everything is spectacular
and in good condition, but below the surface,
we noticed there was something going on there.
NARRATOR: The culprit, alien to these shores,
insatiable in its appetites, shreds through eelgrass
to reach its prey.
MCCARTHY: So as this eelgrass gets sheared off,
it's basically turning what's a forest
or a very rich grassland
into a desert.
NARRATOR: The green crab first appeared
in Nova Scotia waters in the 1950s.
This first invasion was a warmer water crab, though,
and it made very little gains.
MCCARTHY: In the 1980s,
there was a second invasion.
This one was very different
in that it came from the North Sea,
and it brought a very voracious, very aggressive
strain that seems to be going unchecked.
NARRATOR: It's thought that these invaders first arrived
on Nova Scotia shores
through the ballast water of foreign ships,
And in a very short time,
they've come to number in the many, many millions.
The green crab preys very close to shore.
It is tough, aggressive, a dominant predator.
While foraging for food or making its own burrows,
the green crab devastates critical eelgrass habitations,
destabilizing the entire ecosystem,
above and below the beach.
MCCARTHY: So Parks Canada, by about 2010,
realized that if we didn't do something,
we're gonna lose all the eelgrass,
primarily due to the green crab.
At that point, we were at 2% of our original distribution,
about one year of eelgrass left,
and it would be over.
So we made the decision to start to trap them.
MCCARTHY: So we'll head over to that orange one over there.
And this should help us finish up the lower lagoon.
NARRATOR: In an effort to help save the coastline,
Parks Canada employees and volunteers
take to the waters themselves.
Their fight is made up of long hours
and sheer sweat-equity.
MCCARTHY: This species was brought in by man,
we know it's having major impacts,
and we think that we can control it.
We can't eliminate it, but we have controlled it.
NARRATOR: Volunteers work the water,
pulling in green crabs
by using repurposed lobster traps.
MCCARTHY: Okay, that should be good.
Let's see what we got here.
NARRATOR: This trap has been nicknamed "The Terminator",
and its catch-numbers can be incredible.
MCCARTHY: Our best catch, in terms of green crabs,
has been about 1,190 green crabs,
in one trap, in one night.
NARRATOR: And yet it might take help from Mother Nature herself
to truly turn this tide,
Like a policeman of the Atlantic,
here come the boys in blue,
the naturally occurring blue crab.
The blue crab weighs in at four times the size
of its green counterpart.
It also competes for the same foodstuff as the green,
so the more that the blue succeeds,
the more that the green must fail.
But a key difference here is that the blue crab
doesn't destroy the all-important eelgrass
when it forages, unlike the green crab.
Also adding to their value,
the blue crabs have been known to dine
on their problematic cousins.
MCCARTHY: We were starting to think that
perhaps we had some help
that was gonna help control the green crab,
because we know they eat them.
They will indeed be the blue calvary,
'cause in terms of controlling green crab,
I believe that they could be a big instrument,
and save us a lot of effort.
NARRATOR: The blue crab do seem to be
coming to the rescue,
as their numbers take hold in the estuary,
the eelgrass is beginning to recover.
And with it,
the shorebirds and other creatures are coming back,
Balance returning, at the water's edge.
NARRATOR: Elsewhere on the East Coast
is a place of multiple islands,
dense with individual variety,
But coexisting as a harmonious, single biosphere.
The 100 Wild Islands archipelago
is described by conservationists
as "the most valuable islands you've never heard of".
SUTHERLAND: Really there are very few opportunities
in North America
or anywhere on the planet
that you could still protect
an archipelago this size.
NARRATOR: The 100 Wild Islands archipelago
is bigger than you might think.
Despite its name, there are actually
closer to 300 islands in the group.
They're all shapes and sizes,
and they're mostly undisturbed since the Ice Age.
SUTHERLAND: They're so closely nested together,
and some of them so large,
that it's actually one interacting ecosystem.
NARRATOR: Dotting the islands
are many contrasting environments,
Boreal rainforests,
pristine, white sand beaches,
rocky shores, ripe with vegetation,
quiet coves, and their lapping waves.
But dozens of bird species move with ease
between these divergent spaces,
from eagles
to eider ducks.
SUTHERLAND: The birds, the plants,
everything is actually
one sort of big living organism,
which is really exciting from an ecological point of view.
NARRATOR: And on the larger individual islands,
distinct environments can co-exist,
all within a stone's throw,
This is the Shelter Cove Wilderness Sanctuary,
on Mink Island.
NARRATOR: Mink Island, like the rest of this archipelago,
is a kind of Eden,
virtually untouched by human hands.
A first environment is this beach area,
which acts as a cultivator for green and growing things,
The building blocks of all life.
Because the rock here straddles the land and sea,
it makes for an emerging habitat,
WILLISON: It's growing things, but normally
bare rock is bare rock.
But when the bare rock is covered with ocean,
it produces.
And this is what we have here.
NARRATION: Algae, once adrift on the currents,
is able to gain anchor here,
using root-like structures called holdfasts.
WILLISON: This is a characteristic system
of rocky seashores, and in the absence of rock,
we can't have this kind of system
because the rock provides the foundation
upon which these algae and these barnacles,
which are small animals, grow.
NARRATION: Barnacles are actually tiny marine animals
called arthropods.
They're waste eaters,
feeding on microscopic animals, plants,
and broken-down plant materials,
like pieces of this nearby algae.
The barnacles, in turn,
can be eaten by other creatures
higher up on the food chain,
like juvenile fish, sea stars or crabs.
In this way, the rock becomes a literal stepping-stone
for life to move up onto the beach.
And with the long process of time,
such plant life will slow-motion "creep"
further and further inland.
WILLISON: The primary productivity
for the green life on this beach
actually comes from the algae over there.
And they're washed off
by the storms, washed up onto the sand,
and then they release nutrients
and then this weedy vegetation grows up.
NARRATOR: But this isn't the only environment
on the island.
A short walk through the shore grasses
of Shelter Cove
is like parting the curtains of a play,
taking us from one setting
to a second setting in almost no time.
WILLISON: Rather than a sheltered place,
this is a very exposed place.
The vegetation which grows here,
and even the geology,
is quite different from the sandy beach.
NARRATOR: Yin and yang.
Offsetting the sandy beach
is this rugged shore, grand and imposing,
shaped by harsher exposure to the elements.
It's a landscape so rough and tumble
that even seaweed has trouble flourishing.
But even these boulders have a "cause and effect" way
of coaxing life into being, closely nearby.
WILLISON: Over there we can see a cobble beach.
Now those cobbles are there because the storms,
major waves, have washed small boulders,
up out of the water and piled them up,
and creating a barrier.
NARRATION: And it's that natural barrier
that has allowed a third distinct environment
to spring up, over time.
A freshwater pond,
cupped and contained within the landscape,
because those boulders are protecting it from the sea,
and holding it in place.
WILLISON: This water is fresh water
and it's brownish in color.
It's like weak tea.
That brown color comes from the breakdown
of old plants
which release their tannins into the water.
NARRATOR: Over time, this fresh water pond
has become a marsh,
and that marsh has become
a fertile place for plants to thrive.
WILLISON: We can see that the vegetation is so
different again.
We've got irises, we've got ferns,
we've got lots and lots of cranberries in here.
We've got various things which are absent elsewhere,
absent from the sandy beach,
absent from the rocky shore.
NARRATOR: Freshwater ponds
then provide habitat for a diversity of plants,
birds, and insects.
WILLISON: It's so beautiful, it's like a garden,
and yet it's not a garden
that any person had anything to with.
This is a garden made by nature.
NARRATOR: Everywhere on the 100 Wild Islands
there are balanced environments like these,
From the sandy beach, to the rocky shore,
to the freshwater marsh,
all working together in such intimate proximity.
WILLISON: This is what Mother Nature builds,
and isn't it so, so, so beautiful?
SUTHERLAND: That's what's so exciting about
the 100 Wild Islands,
is it's private land conservation, but at a scale
that's ecologically really incredible.
There's no development out here.
It's ecologically rich, really diverse,
and nature is completely free to do its thing here.
NARRATOR: But only an hour away,
humankind is doing its own thing
on Lawrencetown Beach,
Lawrencetown is a stretch of white-sand coastline,
constantly being pounded by the ocean's waves.
During the wilds of winter,
the waves have been known to tower here.
Lawrencetown has become a world destination
for surfers looking to get off the beaten path,
But over time, that beach is getting beaten back
by the power of the ocean.
CHOYCE: Places that I once surfed
and places where I went on long hikes
20 years ago, some of them no longer exist.
NARRATOR: In his writing,
Choyce calls the province's Eastern Shore
a "drowning coast",
a place that is losing its battles to the waves,
current and winds.
These forces of erosion
are chiseling away at the headlands,
and changing the shore's geography forever.
CHOYCE: Right behind me here, Fox Point,
30 years ago you could drive out there
to a little fishing village.
Now you're just seeing, you know, rocks and
a little bit of the wharf that was left there.
It's changed that dramatically
in that short amount of time.
NARRATOR: But as the old expression goes,
"The only constant is change".
From the moment of its creation,
eons back in time,
this coastline has always been in dramatic flux.
CHOYCE: Underneath of where we're standing,
somewhere pretty far down there,
is the bedrock here that's exactly the same bedrock
that's under Morocco,
because this part of Nova Scotia
was once attached to Africa.
NARRATOR: The coastline of Lawrencetown beach
then continued to be shaped
by the mighty glaciers of the last Ice Age.
These glaciers moved across the mainland,
tilling up clay, boulders,
and other materials before them,
Bulldozing them into hilly mounds,
called drumlins.
Where Joggins Cliff is the "snapshot"
of a single environment in time,
these drumlins are a rolling collection
of various environments, loosely ground together.
CHOYCE: Because they're not solid rock,
they're very easily eroded.
So you see a nice round hill
heading up to the sea and you wonder,
Where's the other half of it going down?
Well, it was there once upon a time,
but the sea has
chewed it up and spit it some place else out there.
NARRATOR: These mounds of rocky materials
remain highly vulnerable to the forces of the nearby sea,
Constructive waves are gentler waves,
with small spilling breakers
that carry sand up the beach
and then deposit it there.
These constructive waves build upon the beach,
bit by lapping bit.
Destructive waves are fiercer.
Their plunging breakers crash against the beach
with curling force, and then roll back out,
sucking sand away from the beach.
CHOYCE: Lawrencetown is one of those beaches that
is here in the summer and it's gone in the winter.
The sand migrates off shore.
NARRATOR: Constructive and destructive waves,
working together in balanced combination,
an endless ebb and flow.
But at Lawrencetown Beach,
the storms of winter
highlight the power of destructive waves.
CHOYCE: We get monster waves that come through here
on a fairly regular basis.
It's not uncommon for the sea
to throw rocks into the road
and sometimes they'll close down
the highway in the winter.
The thing that amazes me most is the size of the rocks.
This size, or that size,
and it just indicates the power of the sea.
NARRATOR: It is proven that some waves
travel a mind-boggling distance
before hitting the beach,
sometimes starting as far away as Africa.
These waves are called groundswells,
and are considered the best for surfing,
CHOYCE: It's the action of wind upon water.
You can have wind effect on water here and it can
travel 100 miles and pick up some more energy
from the wind effect there.
So that by the time they arrive here on the shoreline,
maybe we're fortunate enough to not have any wind at all.
NARRATOR: Wind does play its part, though,
in the immediate balance
between a cresting wave and the beach.
CHOYCE: As far as the wave is concerned,
the best waves for surfing tend to be with offshore wind.
You have the wave coming in,
and you have the wind pushing it up and sculpting it
into this beautiful steep, well-formed creation
that's the best kind of wave for surfing.
NARRATOR: Also, as deep ocean waves
make their final arrival toward shore,
they ramp up a shallowing, sandy incline.
This causes the bottom of the wave
to drag and slow down,
while the top of the wave hurtles forward,
and finally crashes over itself.
NARRATOR: Riding that border of beach and sea
can give surfers a humbling understanding
of their place in the balance of nature.
CHOYCE: These beaches here on the Eastern Shore,
what we see here today, may well not be here
as soon as 20 or 50 years in the future
because of this ever-evolving coastline.
NARRATOR: The coastlines of Nova Scotia
hang in a perpetual balance,
What at first might seem like a battle of opposites
is simply two halves of a whole,
ongoing,
each informing the other.
The beach needs the sea.
The high tides need the low.
Birds of flight need grounds of rest.
Green crabs need blue,
if nature is to balance.
From Joggins, where our primordial ancestors
first hauled themselves out of the sea,
To Lawrencetown,
where we throw ourselves back in,
This coast provides us balance as well,
reminding us
that we too are shaped by the wind,
the water,
and the Living Beach.
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