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Place 07 · The Northeast Coast · Wrap-up
Seven Places, One Ocean
A reef, a bay, some islands on the equator, a mountain range under the sea, the ice at the bottom of the world, a patch of plastic nobody can see and the coast a few hours from home: seven places, and one ocean running through all of them.
About 20 minutes · 1 video · a full practice review of the whole Northeast coast
Look back
Seven chapters ago you did not know this
You can now
Follow the salt
Estuaries mix river and sea into brackish water, with dense salt water wedging in underneath. In a drought, the Delaware’s salt front creeps upstream toward Philadelphia’s drinking water, and salt marshes along the edges run a nursery for most of the fish we catch.
You can now
Count the eggs
Horseshoe crabs spawn on spring tides in May and June, and red knots nearly double their weight on the eggs before flying to the Arctic. The bait harvest is now set with the birds in mind: males only.
You can now
Cross the front
The warm Gulf Stream leaves the coast at Cape Hatteras, and cold water from Labrador bathes the coast farther north. Warm-core rings spin off the front, and warm air over cold water makes Maine’s fog.
You can now
Feel the heat
The Gulf of Maine warmed faster than 99% of the ocean for a decade and nearly three times the global rate since 1982. Lobsters boomed north and crashed south, shrimp closed, and black sea bass moved in.
You can now
Mind the yield
Trawlers and too-high quotas took cod past maximum sustainable yield. Canada closed its fishery in 1992 and waited 34 years; scallops, protected in time, rebuilt by 2001.
You can now
Slow the ships
About 384 right whales remain, eating rice-sized copepods between shipping lanes and lobster ropes. Slower ships and ropeless gear are the two big fixes.
You can now
Read the shore
Rock sorts life into zones; sand drifts along the shore and barrier islands roll toward the mainland. The sea rises faster at Atlantic City than at Portland, because the land is sinking there.
Photos: Drone PhotoGraphy reality, Александр Максин, Karolina, Robert Schrader, Kindel Media, Ivan Stecko, Frank Rietsch / Pexels
One more thing
What the Northeast coast is worth now
NASA Goddard — An Ocean in Motion. Five and a half minutes of the world’s currents from NASA’s ECCO ocean model, from the Gulf Stream to the Southern Ocean. Every place in this course is somewhere in this video; see how many you can spot.
The coast by the numbers
- 78.8 million lb — lobster landed in Maine in 2025, worth about $461 million (Maine Department of Marine Resources)
- $332 million — value of Atlantic sea scallops landed in 2024, the first US stock declared rebuilt (2001)
- 384 — North Atlantic right whales at the end of 2024 (estimate released October 2025); 23 calves were born in 2026
- 0 — female Delaware Bay horseshoe crabs that may be caught for bait in 2026 and 2027, leaving their eggs for the red knots
This coast is not a postcard; it is a working ocean. Maine’s lobster fishery still brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, even as the catch slides from its 2016 peak. Scallops show that a stock protected in time can come back, and in 2026 Canada’s northern cod finally reached its healthy zone, 34 years after the moratorium, while New England’s cod are still waiting. On Delaware Bay, the crab harvest is set so that red knots still find their eggs, and offshore, fewer than 400 right whales depend on how fast ships go and how fishing ropes are set. Almost every decision on this coast is a trade between a living and a life, and the people making them are using exactly the science in these seven chapters.
Figures: Maine Department of Marine Resources, NOAA Fisheries, North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium and Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.
Two pictures to take with you
Where the boats come home, and where it all fits
Put it all together
Northeast Coast Review
Seven chapters, one coast. This review walks the whole place, from the salt front to the barrier islands, with a few questions that tie it back to the places before it. Retry as often as you like. If one trips you up, the feedback names the chapter to revisit, and every chapter has its own eight-question practice set at the bottom of the page.
Practice
Northeast Coast Review: the whole place
Twenty questions: two from every chapter, three about what the coast is worth, and three that tie the chapters, and the earlier places, together. Retry as often as you like; the feedback is where the learning is.
Where you go next
The seven places on one map
Put all seven places on one globe and the borders between them disappear. Sunlight feeds the coral of the Great Barrier Reef and drives the winds that turn right off Monterey Bay, pulling cold, rich water up from below. The same winds spin the gyres that carry cold water to the penguins of the Galápagos and pile the North Pacific’s plastic into a patch nobody owns. Beneath all of it, the seafloor is born at the ridge and sinks back into the trench, and the deep basins in between fill with cold, heavy water that sank off Antarctica, joined by water that sinks near Greenland, farther up this same Atlantic. And on the Northeast coast, the Gulf Stream, the Labrador Current, the tides, the fish and the whales all meet the place many of you call home. It is one ocean, and you now know how it works. The nearest piece of it is a few hours’ drive away, down the Hudson or the Delaware. Go and see it with new eyes.
Photo credits (Pexels): Erik Mclean, Phil Evenden, Keverne Denahan.