Area set to receive UNESCO Geopark designation

It's not just an “Old Wife” tale anymore.

After years of meetings and who knows how many “hiccups” along the way, efforts to have the Cliffs of Fundy Geopark officially designated as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) site have at long last come to fruition.

“Finally, finally,” said Anita Maclellen, chairperson of the Cobequid Interpretive Centre Society. “It's been three years working on this Geopark and our hopes and dreams are finally coming through and we're going to have a new influx of tourism on the shore,” she said. “And it should be a really great economic driver for our shore. I'm thinking that people will come from other countries to visit us and they will see how beautiful we are and they will want to stay here. And maybe start businesses and so on. I can only imagine how great it is going to be.”

The official announcement is expected on July 10 for the newest addition to the UNESCO global parks.

Newly-hired manager Beth Peterkin of Parrsboro said she is anxious to get things under way.

“I'm just on the job for my third day and I've already had tons of emails from people looking for information so I think that it's fair to say that there's a lot of excitement out there in the communities,” she said, this week.

“A Unesco-designated Geopark would put the whole Fundy shore from Debert around to Apple River on the world map. UNESCO is a very well recognized destination, of course, and it gets us immediate publicity on many stages that we could never get on by ourselves, being small communities here.”

The Old Wife, at Five Islands Provincial Park, is one of numerous geological formations along the Fundy shore that help give the area its unique make up. It is described on the Cliffs of Fundy Facebook site as being one of the “most striking” coastal vistas in Nova Scotia, and offers one of the best exposures of a monumental event in Earth's history — the breakup of the supercontinent Pangea 200 million years ago along with the birth of the modern continents and Atlantic Ocean.

“As Pangea ripped apart, the greatest outpouring of lava in Earth history gave rise to one of the Five (or Six) mass extinction events in the history of Life, wiping out the competitors of the dinosaurs and ushering in the true reign of the famous reptiles,” the information says. “The dark rocks are basalt — cooled lava — and the red rocks below are the sediments swept by rivers and winds in the rift valley.”

There are 147 UNESCO Global Geoparks in 41 countries. The Cliffs of Fundy site will be Nova Scotia's first and Canada's fourth, after Stonehammer in New Brunswick, British Columbia's Tumbler Ridge and Perce in Quebec.

It received the nod of approval following an evaluation visit to the region last year by UNESCO officials Asier Hilario of the Basque region of Spain and Global Geopark Network president Nikolaos Zouros of Greece.

Maclellan said after viewing some of the region's formations, including the Old Wife, Zouros said the Cliffs of Fundy had the potential to become the number-one

Geopark in the world.

“That just blew my mind,” she said. “When they stepped out on the Old Wife down at Five Islands Provincial Park and looked around the corner and saw the geology that they were looking at, the timeline between the Triassic and the Jurassic period, their jaws just dropped. Really, they were just knocked out by it.

“And they were like that with everywhere, down on the shore everywhere.”

Beyond the jaw-dropping geological offerings, however, the region is also rich with fossils, dinosaur remains the world's highest tides along with Indigenous and Acadian culture, history and traditions.