Old maps reveal how much of Point Pleasant Park has been lost to erosion

Jonathan Fowler has been walking the paths of Point Pleasant Park in Halifax for decades, since he was a little kid.

Over time, he's noticed changes.

"The shoreline seems to be moving inland, and particularly after big storms," he says. "It just appears that we're losing more of the park to the ocean."

Fowler, an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at Saint Mary's University, decided to put his observations to the test.

Using a combination of old maps, aerial photos and laser-imaging technology, he is trying to measure how much the ocean has encroached on the land in the park.

Fowler has studied maps of Point Pleasant Park dating back centuries, but he discovered that most of the earliest ones were not suitable for his project.

"We've got maps from French cartographers who were doing this in the very early 1700s, it's just that they weren't surveying that area super carefully," he says.

"It needs to be of really high quality, and by that I mean really carefully surveyed at a large scale. And unfortunately, most of the maps just aren't."

The earliest map that's detailed enough is a British military survey plan of the park from 1858 that even shows the low and high tide marks.

Traces of that survey work still linger in the park today — small etchings, no bigger than the palm of a hand, made in rocks that indicate survey points.

Fowler uses fixed points in the park that have not changed in a couple of centuries, such as the Prince of Wales Tower, the intersection of certain paths, monuments, forts and even outcroppings of bedrock, to analyze how things have changed along the shore.

On a recent snowy day, Fowler trekked around the park with a group of his students, using a GPS to collect location data. Those data points allow him to digitally stitch together current locations with old maps and aerial photos to make comparisons.

His preliminary data suggests the coastline has changed by about 10 metres in some locations from about 1860 to today. Fowler says some places in the park, such as the southeastern area near the Point Pleasant Battery, appear to be more affected than others. 

As he presses forward with his work, the municipality is eyeing making changes to improve shoreline resilience at the park.