Grand Banks

A major fishing ground in the N Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, formed by an extensive submarine plateau on the continental shelf. The plankton-rich shallow waters are an important breeding area for fish.

The Grand Banks are a group of underwater plateaus southeast of Newfoundland on the North American continental shelf.

The mixing of these waters and the shape of the ocean bottom here lift nutrients to the surface.

In addition to the effects on nutrients, the mixing of the cold and warm currents often causes fog in the area.

Several navigators, including Basque fisherman are known to have fished these waters in the 15th century.

On November 18, 1929, a major earthquake (known as the 1929 Grand Banks earthquake) on the southwestern part of the Grand Banks bordering the Laurentian Channel caused an underwater landslide which resulted in extensive damage to transatlantic cables and generated a rare Atlantic tsunami that struck the south coast of Newfoundland and eastern Cape Breton Island claiming 27 lives in the Burin Peninsula.

Technological advances in fishing such as large factory ships and sonar, as well as geopolitical disputes over territorial sea and exclusive economic zone (EEZ) boundaries, have led to overfishing and a serious decline in the fish stocks of the Grand Banks. Canada's EEZ currently occupies the majority of the Grand Banks except for the lucrative "nose" (eastern extremity, near the Flemish Cap) and "tail" (southern extremity) of the fishing bank.

Canada is currently performing the hydrographic and geological surveys necessary for claiming the entire continental shelf off eastern Canada, under the auspices of the latest United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Petroleum reserves have also been discovered and a number of oil fields are under development in this region, most notably the Hibernia, Terra Nova, and White Rose projects;

Semi-fictional depictions of fishermen working on the Grand Banks can be found in Sebastian Junger's novel The Perfect Storm (1997) and in Rudyard Kipling's novel Captains Courageous (1897).