Wapusk National Park of Canada

Features

Map of park.
© Parks Canada

Covering 11,475 square kilometers south and east of Churchill Manitoba, Wapusk National Park is a vast, low-lying plain beside Hudson Bay. Continuous permafrost, topped by the most extensive mantle of peat in North America, shapes the land, and water in the form of lakes, bogs, fens, streams and rivers covers half of the land's surface. This geologically young landscape is still slowly rising due to isostatic rebound. It continues to "de-compress" after being relieved of the weight of the last continental glaciers that melted back about 9000 years ago. The land here rises further above sea level at a rate of up to one meter every century. You can see evidence of this slow process in the ancient beach ridges that now parallel the Hudson Bay coast… up to 100 km. inland!

If you were to travel from northeast to southwest in the park, you would start in the marine coastal habitat, pass through tundra and end in taiga. The coastal area is marked by salt marshes, dunes, beaches and an extensive inter-tidal zone that spans up to 10 kilometers between low and high tide marks. The tundra is made up of ancient beach ridges, sedge meadows, peatlands and tundra ponds. Finally, trees --white spruce, larch and willows-- transform the landscape into the patchy, stunted northern forest of the taiga.