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
Curvature of a helix, part 2
So where we left off, we were looking at this parametric function for a three-dimensional curve and what it draws. I showed you was a helix in three-dimensional space, and we’re trying to find its curvature. The way you think about that is you have a circ…
The Key to Living a Longer Life | Breakthrough
NIR Barzilai has been studying a group of exceptionally healthy hundred year olds, or centenarians. “Hi Milton, so nice meeting you!” He believes they’re a model for how we can all age. “Come on in fellas!” One of the interesting things with those cen…
Watch One Family's Journey Through A Life-Changing Face Transplant | National Geographic
I love you. You just make sure you have to be dreams, okay? That’s ever. I love you. We’re just outside the door. You’re a great hand into the best. All right, okay? We invent the wrong McDonald’s house as a last week. Two years, there’s so many different…
LC natural response example
So, in previous videos, we worked out an expression for the current ( i ) in an LC circuit like this, and what we found was that ( i ) is the square root of capacitance over inductance times the starting voltage ( v_0 ) times sine ( \omega_0 t ). And ( \…
TIL: Why Do These Monkeys Have Big, Colorful Butts? | Today I Learned
[Music] So female mandrills, they do actually like males with nice big colorful bumps. The males, they are so handsome; they have both pink, purple, blue, and red, and it shines so brightly that you have no doubt where he is when he walks in the forest fa…
Introducing a New Cheetah! – Day 81 | Safari Live
Interim! Let’s send you all the way on down-south, 1,600 miles to Scott. Hello everyone! You may have just seen a bird fly through the thick undergrowth there. We were hoping it would stick around. So, it’s calling it “say orange-breasted bush shrike,” a…