Race Against Time
Scientists are rushing to crack the mysteries of the Gulf of Maine before the clock runs out.
By Colin Woodard
When English explorers first ventured into the Gulf of Maine in the early seventeenth century, they found marine resources the likes of which they'd never seen. There were banks of codfish the size and weight of a grown man, rivers choked with shoe-sized oysters, and fifteen-pound lobsters lurking in the rockweed. Fishing off Cape Cod in 1602, Captain Bartholomew Gosnold's men reported being so "pestered" by codfish "that we were forced to throw numbers of them overboard again."New England, as we know it, began in pursuit of the Gulf's bounty.
