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The Ocean in Seven Places · Place 07
The Northeast Coast
Cold water from Labrador, warm water from the tropics, the biggest city in the country, and a crab that is older than the dinosaurs: welcome home.
Seven short chapters · about 15 minutes each · a practice set at the end of every chapter
Start here
What you are walking into
This is the last of the seven places, and it is the closest to home. The Hudson starts in New York’s Adirondacks and the Delaware in its Catskills, and both carry New York water down to the Atlantic, so the coast from Delaware Bay to the Gulf of Maine is where New York State meets the sea. It is a coast where a warm current from the tropics meets cold water from Labrador, where one of the fastest-warming patches of ocean on Earth sits off Maine, and where fewer than 400 right whales thread their way between ships and lobster ropes. Seven short chapters, each with a video, something to play with and very little reading, walk it from the estuaries to the rocks.
You already know more about it than you think. The tides that push salt up the Delaware are the tides from Monterey (Place 02), and the salt is the salt from the reef (Place 01). The Gulf Stream is the Atlantic twin of the Kuroshio from the garbage patch (Place 06) and the gyres of the Galápagos (Place 03). The cod collapse is the sardine story from Monterey, told bigger and slower; the 200-mile limits are the EEZs from Place 06; and the North Atlantic Deep Water you met in the Southern Ocean (Place 05) sinks not far to the north, near Greenland. This time, it is your ocean.
Before you start
Watch this first
NASA Crew Earth Observations — Narrated: Up the East Coast of North America. Eighty seconds of night-time footage from the International Space Station, sweeping from the Gulf of Mexico up the whole East Coast to Newfoundland. Find the glow of New York City; it is not hard.
And then this: whales off Cape Cod
NOAA Sanctuaries — Whale Watching in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Two minutes on the animals you can meet just off the coast of Massachusetts. The whales, as usual, are less interested in you than you are in them.
The seven chapters
Your route along the coast
Chapter 1
Half River, Half Sea
The Hudson is called the river that flows both ways, and in a drought the Delaware’s salt creeps upstream toward Philadelphia’s drinking water.
Chapter 2
The Crab That Feeds a Flight
A robin-sized bird flies up from the tip of South America and nearly doubles its weight on the eggs of an animal older than the dinosaurs.
Chapter 3
Where Warm Meets Cold
Off Cape Hatteras, a warm river in the sea turns away from the coast, and cold water from Labrador slides in to take its place.
Chapter 4
The Fastest-Warming Water
The Gulf of Maine warmed faster than 99% of the world’s ocean, and the lobsters moved before the people did.
Chapter 5
The Fish That Built New England
In 1602 the cod were so thick that a captain named a cape after them. In 1992 Canada closed the fishery.
Chapter 6
Right Whales in a Busy Sea
About 384 North Atlantic right whales are left, eating animals the size of a grain of rice in one of the busiest seas on Earth.
Chapter 7
Rock, Sand and Rising Water
Maine’s coast is rock scraped bare by glaciers; New Jersey’s is sand that walks. The sea is rising faster on one of them.
Photos: Lena Pielke, Dusty Ruth, Brian, Matthis Volquardsen, Julia Barthold, John Cronin, Leah Newhouse / Pexels
Play with it
Check the surf from Delaware Bay to Maine
This live map shows today’s wave forecast along the Northeast coast, from Delaware Bay to the Gulf of Maine. Find where the waves are biggest, compare the open coast of Cape Cod with the sheltered water inside Delaware Bay and Long Island Sound, and click anywhere to read the wave height.
Live map: Windy.com, using the ECMWF wave forecast.
How to use these pages
Watch it, read it, try it
Every chapter has the same rhythm: a video, three short cards, something live to explore, and a couple of hands-on activities. The last activity on each page is an eight-question practice set that covers the whole chapter. Do every one, retry anything you miss, and read the feedback. The wrap-up page ends with a twenty-question review of the whole coast.
Warm-up
What do you already know?
Six true-or-false guesses before you start. Getting some wrong right now is the point: each answer tells you which chapter explains it.
Ready?
Chapter 1 is fifteen minutes and mostly pictures
Photo credits (Pexels): Owen Casey, K.