Canadian Shield
The Rocks that Made Canada
- Publisher
- Fitzhenry and Whiteside
- Initial publish date
- Nov 2010
- Category
- Geography, Landscapes
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781554551408
- Publish Date
- Nov 2010
- List Price
- $40.00
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
Being a Canadian carries with it a tangible sense of living on the edge of a vast barren interior. Only named as such in 1883, the Canadian Shield is an empty immensity of lakes, bogs, rivers, forest and protruding ribs of hard Precambrian crystalline rock that covers more than half of the total land area of Canada.
This book traces the geologic evolution of the Shield, its first tentative exploration by humans starting 11,000 years ago as the last great ice sheets withdrew, its changing economic fortunes as Europeans penetrated its remote rocky vastnesses for furs and metals, and its transformation in the twentieth century into a national icon to Canadians.
Regarded as 'barren' and of no value, much of the Shield was given away in 1670 to a single London-based fur trading company, the Hudson Bay Company, who jealously guarded its northern domain until 1867. This two hundred year long monopoly created a virtual government over a huge piece of North America. Without the HBC, much of it would have passed into American hands and there would have been no 'Canadian' Shield or country called Canada. As a nation, we are indebted to hard rock.
About the authors
Nick Eyles
holds a Ph.D (East Anglia) and D.Sc. (Leicester) and is Professor of Geology at the University of Toronto. His prime research interest is in glacial sedimentology and has many years' experience with field work at modern glaciers. He has worked at the universities of Leicester, Newcastle upon Tyne and East Anglia in Great Britain, at Memorial University in Newfoundland and has been at Toronto since 1981 when he was awarded a prestigious NSERC University Research Fellowship. He has authored more than 150 publications in leading scientific journals on ice age geology and environmental geology and has conducted geological fieldwork from the Arctic to the Antarctic, including work with the Ocean Drilling Program onboard the drillship Resolution. Recent sabbaticals have been held in Brazil and Australia. His other books include Canada Rocks and Ontario Rocks.
Arnold Zageris - photographer - was born in Germany in 1948 to a Latvian father and German mother. At the age of two and a half years, the Zageris family immigrated to Canada and settled in the remote northern mining town of Rouyn—Noranda, Quebec. Here he was exposed to the vast Canadian frontier, and as young man fully took advantage of exploring this extensive wilderness, always becoming more aware of nature's beauty, variety and fragility.
After obtaining degrees in science and education, Zageris returned to his home town to teach. This gave him the opportunity to use his extended summer holidays to travel, and also canoe some of Canada's more northernly rivers. It was on one of these trips that he took a picture that would kindle his passion for photography. It won the grand prize from Nikon's "Response and Recognition" world photography contest, awarding him a Nikon camera, lenses and binoculars.
This led to photography courses in the USA where he was advised by Eliot Porter (1901—1990) to use a 4" x 5" view camera in order to capture nature's finer details. Eliot Furness Porter was an American photographer best known for his intimate colour photographs of nature. It was a more expensive medium, but it taught him to slow down and see the world more carefully. A single compelling image per week was considered successful, and is a truism he still strives for today.
Zageris has won many awards for his work and has exhibited in public and private galleries across Canada including: Art Bank of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Canadian Museum of Nature, the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, and The Rooms in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. He is the author of two books: On the Labrador in 2013 and Antarctica in 2016. His upcoming book, Iceland, Born of Lava, Chiseled by Ice is slated to be published in the fall of 2020.
Zageris now lives with his wife Joan in Peterborough, Ontario. He still travels to photograph remote places, but when not working he spends his free summers on Lac Kanasuta.
"Tessa Macintosh is an award-winning northern photographer who raised her family in Yellowknife. In 35 years she has been fortunate to photograph many wonderful northerners and fantastic places across the North. Her photos illustrate the 7 other books in The Land is Our Storybook series, and her work is included in Canadian Shield (2011). She has fond memories of previous visits to Great Bear Lake, beginning 30 years ago, toddler in tow, to photograph Elders making snowshoes."
Tessa Macintosh's profile page
One of Canada's foremost painters and print makers, Ed Bartram has been inspired by the colours, textures, and history of the Canadian Shield. Resident for most of the year in King City, Ontario, Bartram spends his summers chronicling the ever-changing dynamics of his small island just off Parry Sound in Georgian Bay.
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