“Peril in the Gulf of Maine”

Life; fragile and indestructible, eradicable and perseverant, it all began within the worlds ocean’s. Today in 2010, the ocean is viewed as a means of monetary value, no longer respected for allocating life but sustaining economies. Exploited and in peril, the Gulf of Maine now exemplifies Man's disdain.

The Gulf of Maine has been the back bone of Maine’s local and commercial fishing industries for generations, providing in excess of millions of dollars to the state, via the direct harvesting and retail of fish and through the large amount of tourism that is partially generated by the industry. But Maine’s fishing industry has been in a state of slow decline for the past decade, overfishing and regulations have crippled the industry to its core.

The Gulf of Maine is delineated by Cape Cod at the eastern tip of Massachusetts in the southwest and Cape Sable at the southern tip of Nova Scotia in the northeast. It includes the entire coastlines of New Hampshire and Maine, as well as Massachusetts north of Cape Cod and the southern and western coastlines of the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The Gulf includes, The Bay of Fundy and Georges Bank, two geographical locations high bioproductivity due to tidal mixing and ocean currents.

Once Atlantic Cod and Halibut were the central fisheries on Georges Bank, overtime bottom trawlers became more efficient, catching a staggering amount of fish in a single day. Some accounts claim that with the invention of ocean trawlers, a single vessel could catch in one hour, what the traditional methods could catch in an entire season. Species in the bank flip-flop due to this kind of large scale fishing, large numbers of fish are removed in a relatively short period of time, allowing more fish to be harvested, causing species fluctuations on the bank. Major species fluctuations can alter entire marine ecosystems, changing the bioproductivity of a region. Thus a fishery could collapse, as has happened in the Gulf before.

The Gulf of Maine is also been identified as an energy resource, tidal power, wind farms and oil research have all been conducted and or proposed for the area. Tidal power in The Bay of Fundy, located between Canada and the United States, is considered the region most economically feasible for tidal power production in the western hemisphere, due to its tidal range. The Bay of Fundy has the largest tides in the world, up to 16 meters or 53 feet during a spring tide; this is due to the shape of the bay itself, the bay gets progressively narrower allowing for the extreme tides. The potential energy output of a tidally-driven facility in this area is projected at 17 billion Kilowatt hours with the capacity of 6 million Kilowatts, in terms of usage; this is roughly 22% of New England's energy consumption for 1978.

Tidal power is renewable and available locally; it creates jobs and does not produce any green house gas or harmful byproducts. But there just so happens to be a downfall, tidal power effects the environment in extreme and unnatural ways. A result of a tidal barrage site is water stratification, which hinders the production of plankton, the key to life in the ocean as it is the base of the marine food chain. The Gulf of Maine is famous for large spring blooms of plankton and algae. A tidal barrage facility could disrupt this massive accumulation of life, affecting not only the algae, but essentially every marine organism in the Gulf, as every marine organism is dependent on plankton either directly or indirectly. The collapse of the spring bloom could have effects on the Gulf of Maine in ways that cannot be predicted by computer models.

Tidal barrage facilities also reduce tidal oscillation periods and change tidal distances and direction slightly. While tidal oscillation periods are decreased, tidal amplitude increases. Research shows that substantial coastal flooding would submerge a narrow part of the Maine coast. A variety of other problems then follow suit, length of growing season, seasonal weather regimes and biodiversity are all affected by the barrage.

The bottom line is can we afford such extreme consequences that could potentially damage to productivity of the Gulf of Maine, one of the most biologically diverse regions in the world.