ii9 

 CHALEUR BAY 



PHYSIOGRAPHIC NOTE. 

 (J. W. GOLDTHWAIT.) 



Chaleur bay, like the smaller Miramichi on the south 

 and the greater St. Lawrence on the north, is a broad river 

 valley which has been deeply drowned beneath the sea. 

 At its head, west of Campbellton, it narrows to a slender 

 point, into which the Restigouche and Matapedia rivers 

 discharge. Similar sharp re-entrants or tributary estuaries 

 lie at the mouth of its other large branches, the Nipisiguit 

 at Bathurst and the Nouvelle and Cascapedia rivers on the 

 north side. The drowning seems to have taken place 

 during the Pleistocene period. 



In this narrower upper portion of Chaleur bay evidences 

 of submergence seem nowhere to extend above 50 feet 

 (15-2 m.). Apparently the ice sheet lingered longer here 

 than over the coast beyond Bathurst, covering the ground 

 during the greater part of the stage of post-Glacial sub- 

 mergence. In no other way does it seem possible to explain 

 the complete absence of elevated beaches like those at 

 Bathurst (195 feet or 59-5 m.) and the presence in their 

 place, in the zone below 200 feet, of kames whose sides 

 appear to be too steep to have been covered by the sea 

 for even a short time since the ice sheet released them from 

 its grasp. 



According to Chalmers, the striae and direction in 

 which boulders and till have been transported indicate 

 that the ice which mantled the country around Chaleur 

 bay during the Glacial period moved radially into it from 

 the north, west and south, forming a local, estuarine 

 glacier. In the later stages the ice seems still to have pushed 

 down from the high interior of Gaspe through such valleys 

 as the Cascapedia and Nouvelle, after it had disappeared 

 as a sheet from the coast. The kames of the north shore 

 of the bay, which lie unmodified on ground within the 

 200-foot limit, seem to demand this. 



On the way from Campbellton to Bathurst the railway 

 skirts the shore of the bay, affording distant views of the 

 rugged plateau of the Gaspe peninsula. A mile beyond 

 Nash creek it reaches the eastern end of the great Resti- 

 gouche kame, a fairly continuous ridge which extends 



