yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

What Is the 'Gray Zone' Border Between the U.S. and Canada? | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

The United States and Canada share the longest undefended border in the world. Most of the time, it's as peaceful as it sounds, but not always. Since the 1700s, a tiny turf war has been smoldering between the two countries. The grand prize: an uninhabited island in the Atlantic Ocean and a nearby rock.

Welcome to Machias Seal Island. The island lies just off the coast of Maine and Canada's Grand Manan Island. It's so small that it could fit into New York City's Central Park more than 40 times over. But this area of the sea is known as the gray zone because the U.S. and Canada both claim it, and neither one seems ready to back down.

Why? Old paperwork, national pride, and lobsters—lots of lobsters. In 1783, the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War put Machias Seal Island under U.S. control, but Canada said, “Not so fast.” According to the land grant that founded Nova Scotia, the island belonged to Canada. The countries have been quietly jockeying for island supremacy ever since.

Canada's made the biggest land grab so far, building a lighthouse there in the 1830s. The U.S., meanwhile, pretends that the lighthouse isn't there because, gray zone. This all sounds pretty polite, but sometimes the tension escalates. The U.S. Border Patrol stopped a lot of Canadian fishing boats in the area in 2018. It said it was enforcing immigration laws and other violations of federal law.

The Border Patrol didn't arrest anyone and claims the stops were routine, but some Canadians ID them as a potential flexing of American muscle. Canada's fisheries minister expressed concerns, saying that lobstermen from the two countries have happily worked side-by-side. That's mostly the case.

The gray zone is chock-full of valuable lobsters. Lobstermen's tempers have sometimes risen and ebbed with the price of the catch over the years. Lobstering squabbles have occasionally rocked the boat in the gray zone, especially when market prices are going up. But things are generally copacetic.

It's all the same to the puffins and other birds that live on the island, which is an important seabird colony. They're studied by a handful of researchers and visited by up to 30 tourists a day—15 from Canada and 15 from the U.S. But until the neighboring nations decide that this dispute is for the birds, things in the gray zone are likely to stay gray. Locals are holding their breath for the next brew's national ego.

More Articles

View All
Envy Can Be Useful, or It Can Eat You Alive
Do you want to tell us about some of the jobs that you had as a youth and the specific job that kicked off your fanatical obsession with creating wealth? This gets a little personal, and I don’t want to do the humble brag thing. There was some thread goin…
Mapping shapes example
So I’m here on the Khan Academy exercise for mapping shapes, and I’m asked to map the movable quadrilateral onto quadrilateral ABCD using rigid transformations. Here in blue, I have the movable quadrilateral, and I want to map it onto this quadrilateral …
Lessons Learned From Working on a Historic American West Railroad | Short Film Showcase
[Music] America built the railroads, and the railroads built America. Americans, Americans of all nationalities. [Music] America’s not just a place. America is a concept. There is nothing we can’t accomplish if we put our mind to it, that we were not afra…
Warren Buffett: How Inflation Will Impact the Stock Market (2021)
It’s no secret that inflation is top of mind for investors right now, as prices for housing, lumber, copper, steel, and countless other commodities and goods increase at the fastest rate in years. It is natural for an investor to wonder how inflation can …
Introduction to Middle school biology | Khan Academy
Hi everyone! Sal Khan here and welcome to middle school biology. I have Iman Howard here who manages our STEM content. Welcome, Iman! And why should folks care about middle school biology? Biology is the study of life and so in this course, it really ans…
The Lighthouse Keeper | Khaffeine, an audio journey by Khan Academy
[Music] You wake to the sound of crashing waves swelling and breaking against the breakwaters outside your home. They have a rhythm to them, a rhythm you’ve grown accustomed to like a heartbeat. They build, swell and crash, build, swell and crash again an…