2025-06-06 02:00:25
Earlier this week, we saw all the reasons why current dating apps don’t work.
But then why don’t new ones quickly appear to dislodge them? Because of the cold start problem.
If a dating app has lots of women, men will go there. If there are lots of men, then more women will join. This will attract other men, which…
2025-06-04 02:01:12
People are spending more and more time alone. They suffer from loneliness and have a harder time meeting other people, whether for friendship, networking, or dating. Current solutions are bad. What would be a better way to help people meet?
As I shared in A Mental Epidemic:
There are so many one-person households now—and ever more!
As I shared in this update:
From the late 1970s to the late 1990s, the frequency of hosting friends for parties, games, dinners, and so on declined by 45%. Then it got worse. Between the early 2000s and the latest data, the average amount of time that Americans spent hosting or attending social events declined another 32%.
From 1965 to 1995, the typical adult gained 6 weekly hours in leisure time. They funneled almost all of it into one activity: watching TV.
The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50% since the early 1990s.
According to Princeton's Patrick Sharkey, today's adults spend an additional 99 minutes inside their homes on any given day, compared with 2003.
The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends outside the home on any given night has declined by more than 30% in the past 20 years.
74% of all restaurant traffic now comes from “off premises” customers—takeout and delivery. And according to data gathered by OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29% in just the past two years. The top reason given? The need for more “me time.”
The US Surgeon General summarized it this way:
Who suffers from this the most? Young adults:
People under 35 years old are spending more and more time alone. This is more true before they partner up and have children. They spend the most important period of socialization in life, when core social ties are formed, alone.
At the same time, fewer young adults get drivers licenses, have tried alcohol, work for pay, and have ever dated.
And nowhere is this more apparent than in the dating market.
This lack of socialization means the share of people who are single today is higher than ever.
More than half of young adults don’t have a spouse or steady partner now.
And it’s not like this is desired. Most singles want to find a relationship, they just don’t know how to do it.
According to the US Census, 78% of Americans are adults. Since there are 340M Americans, that’s 265M people. Of those, 15% are looking for a partner. That’s 53M singles.
And the vast majority of them are already using online apps.
We can expect this number to reach ~80% of all couples in the coming years, which means the Total Addressable Market for dating apps is ~42M people just in the US, and about 10x that internationally. At $10 per month, that’s billions of dollars in potential revenue every year.
Why have dating apps worked so well, and do they contribute to loneliness?
In real life, you only meet so many people, because you’re physically limited in time and space. You can only go to a bar a few times a week, and then only be in one bar at a time, and only in bars in close proximity to you. That means you only meet a few candidates at a time, and the likelihood is low that two people who like each other will meet.
Online, that’s not the case. You can browse all the people in your city at once, all day and all night. It’s very likely that there are at least a few people you like. And you save time, money, and hassle.
In real life (IRL), once you find somebody you’re interested in, you need to get up and go talk with that person, getting into an awkward initial conversation, and facing the fear of rejection.
That doesn’t happen in online dating apps. You put your profile up, and don’t see all the people who reject you. You do see all the people who like you, which makes you feel good, and you can immediately learn a bunch of things about them. You can then have several conversations with flirts in parallel. By the time you meet, you will have been able to weed out many non-contenders.
IRL, you never know whether the person might physically harm you. Online, you can check people out first, increasing the chances that the person is normal and safe.
These are the main reasons that dating apps have been so successful. Unfortunately, despite these advantages, dating apps are not solving the problem: There are many apps, but many people don’t like using them.
The number of users of dating apps has been dropping precipitously since the end of the pandemic.
As a result, the stocks of companies like Match Group and Bumble, owners of some of the most famous dating apps, are at historic lows, down 85% and 95% respectively.
See how they compare to the broader market:
Why?
If you're 20 and you want to be married by 30, you should date a lot of people until you’re 23 without committing to anyone, and then marry the first person you meet that’s better than all your former partners. Why? This is called the explore-exploit algorithm.
When you want to find the best pick out of a pool of options, you need to first know the pool of options, and then pick the best. That means you need to explore the quality of the pool first, and once you know it, you can pick the best option.
In a restaurant you go to frequently, that means exploring the menu and tasting different dishes, finding the best ones, and then sticking to those. The exploration phase is when you try all the dishes, the exploitation when you have found the good ones and now enjoy them.
Something similar happens with dating: There are millions of options, so how do you know who to pick for marriage? The best way is to date a bunch of people for a certain period, in which you don’t commit to anybody. That’s the exploration phase. Then, once you know what a good partner looks like, you move to the exploitation phase: Stick to the first partner that is better than any other one you’ve met before. If you can’t ever date past partners, the optimal time to spend exploring is 37%. Hence dating lots of people until you’re 23 and committing to the best one that comes along after that.
The problem is that this explore-exploit algorithm gets miscalibrated in the modern age.
We have not evolved in a world with infinite candidates. We evolved in a world where we had at best a dozen suitors, and selected our partners among them. That means your exploration phase could be very short. We have evolved to satisfice: Find the best within what’s accessible.
When thousands of candidates pass in front of your eyes, you get overwhelmed. You spend hours and hours swiping left and right. Since there are so many candidates, you believe you can find the perfect one, and get trained to let go of most. But nobody is perfect, so after meeting, you find something wrong with your date, and go back to try again. There’s always somebody better. In other words, you get stuck in exploration mode.
"People think that they just have a million options. It's like when you want to watch a show, and you put on Netflix, and you literally find yourself not being able to decide for an hour, and then you wind up not watching anything."—26 yo
This cycle becomes infinite and annoying, and even if you want to get out of it, others on the dating apps are trained to do the same, so it’s hard to escape that vicious exploration circle.
Because there are so many candidates to sift through, and reading takes too long, candidates are more efficiently selected visually: A picture is worth a thousand words.
It’s not fun, it’s so superficial and it’s also just like really exhausting.—TikTok influencer, via The Economist.
The consequence, though, is that people who look good are more likely to find partners. This means people who don’t look good have a very hard time on dating apps, even though they might have many other great assets.
Usually, men are more interested in sexual relations early on, and women in commitment.
This results in lots of men joining dating apps for casual sex. Women get overwhelmed with this demand, and reject most men.
Half of women surveyed by Pew said they felt overwhelmed by the number of messages they received. It doesn’t help that 84% of Tinder users are men. So are 61% of those on Bumble, which is targeted at women. Many users also fret about scams.—The Economist.
However, since women feel that they are in high demand and can therefore pick, they go for the most attractive men.
These men get lots of attention, and realize they can have all the sex they want, without having to commit. As a result, they behave accordingly with women.
Women then notice that men are non-committal, feel used for sex, and also feel alienated by the apps.
Meanwhile, all the men who are not at the top of attractiveness feel rejected and drop out of the dating pool.
We end up with two small group of winners:
Hot men who get all the sex they want
Women who love having sex
And two big groups of losers:
The majority of men, who can’t even get dates
The majority of women, who would prefer commitment
One of the most replicable findings in sexual research is that men and women who are similar pair up:
Dating apps have tried to emulate this with an Elo rating. What is that?
In games like chess, tennis, or international football (soccer), where not every player or team can face each other, they are ranked based on who they win or lose against. The better the player, the more a win counts to increase your Elo score, and vice-versa: If you lose against a very bad player, he will gain lots of Elo points while you will lose many. This results in a complete stack rank of all players or teams.
This is basically the same process that all dating app algorithms use to rank their users:
Each time somebody Likes you (swipe right), your Elo score goes up.
If “hot people” (= high Elo score) Like you, your score will go up a lot. If they don’t ike you, it won’t impact you much. Conversely, if a person who Likes everybody also likes you, it won’t impact your score much. But if that same person doesn’t like you, you’ll lose a load of points.
The result is that all users of a dating app are stack-ranked, from hottest to least attractive. Then, filters are applied to that ranking to only show the ones that fit your criteria—for example, only people of a certain age, height, or smoking habits.
And since people Like others mostly based on their appearance, what this means is that, within your filters, hot people are shown to hot people, and normal people to normal people, and that’s the main criterion to match people.
But this is not how the world works! Looks are just one of many dimensions of assortative mating. Religion, intelligence, education, money… They all matter, but none of them appear in apps as key inputs in the overall rating. In the end, they serve well physically attractive people and those interested in casual sex, but few others.
An illustration of this is Grindr: Targeted to the LGBTQ community, its stock is reaching historical maxima.
This makes sense because LGBTQ are a minority who have a hard time finding each other, and never had widespread options of safe places to meet in real life. Additionally, Grindr is geared towards sex more than relationships. All this makes an app ideal to solve the need:
Since there are few LGBTQ people, concentrating them all in one place increases the market liquidity dramatically.
Since LGBTQ is still stigmatized in some places, the anonymity of an app is ideal.
Standards for sex are lower and much easier to assess than standards for a long-term relationship.
Many people find dating apps too straightforward, a meat market where it’s all about sex and very little about finding meaningful connection. They would prefer a more natural way of meeting people, where sex is a potential outcome, but not the primary one. This is why parties or activities with friends used to be such a common way of meeting new partners: Go for the activity, come back with a partner.
This is especially true for women: As we have seen, they have a strong incentive to look chaste, because then the man can have confidence any resulting child is his, and he’s not spending resources on someone else’s child. A woman who is on a dating app is strongly indicating openness to new partners and to sex, which makes chastity signaling more difficult.
Another benefit of traditional dating is that, without noticing, you’ve already hyperselected candidates into a pool you’re more likely to be attracted to:
Dating apps mess up the natural dynamic of meeting someone, being acquaintances for a while to observe and measure compatibility, and then beginning a friendship with the purpose of measuring mutual interest. Dating apps skip all of those steps.
An obvious way this is true is crime: Your friends are likely to avoid criminals. At a minimum, they will likely know if one of their friends is a criminal, and will relay that info to you if you need it. That’s not the case in dating apps:
40% of women reported having been called an offensive name while using dating sites. More than 10% had been threatened with physical violence.—Source
We’re also more used to the organic process of getting to know somebody than the transactional one of assessing each other’s viability:
I’ve never had a single boyfriend who I met once and immediately started dating. Every single person I either met as a friend and either talked to a lot or saw around at various gatherings constantly before we started a romantic relationship. Meeting people in recurring settings, like church hobby classes, or local board game nights, seems to make a lot of sense.—Lehoho
Dating apps are great because they’re easy to use and they present many potential partners. The issue is that sifting through lots of people is hard. But processing photos is easy, so that’s what these apps prioritize. The result is that the apps are based on appearances, which pushes them to gear towards sex. Additionally, since they assess all customers based on an Elo score, they end up stack-ranking them based on looks and matching them accordingly, which is not how humans partner up in real life. It also just feels dirty to many to date through apps.
These are all the issues that customers face when using these apps, why dating apps are losing customers, and why most people using them feel frustrated.
This, in turn, is a major contributor to why many people feel alone today, especially young adults. If we want to alleviate loneliness, we need to solve this problem.
What would be a better solution than dating apps? I’ll write about it in the premium article of this week.
If you know anyone building new apps in this space, let me know!
2025-05-29 20:02:44
Before 1980, about 3% of Albertans wanted independence from Canada. Now, 25% to 35% of Albertans do.1
Why? This cartoon from 1915 illustrates it:
2025-05-26 22:02:16
Why is French only spoken in Québec, and not all of Canada? Why not in all of North America?
You might think you know the answer, but do you know the root cause? Yes, France owned what’s now Québec, but why did it go to war with Britain? And why did the British prevail? Why didn’t the British eradicate the French after winning? Why did the French language survive over 250 years of British hegemony? If you asked somebody in 1700 what languages would be spoken in the future in North America, would he have known that English would prevail?
These are the territories that France claimed by 1750:
This is a map of how things had changed by 1763:
How do we go from a massive French presence in North America in 1750 to its disappearance 12 years later? How did the British take control of nearly the whole continent so fast? Why does most of North America speak English and not French?
What you might not know is that, by 1750, the region was already de facto British: In the middle of the 18th century, New France had 60k people while the British colonies had about 1.2M—20x more! Why?
The main reason for this was immigration: While France had sent 16k settlers to the St Lawrence Valley by the early 1700s, and a total of 30k by 1760, British colonies had received 10x that, including ~125k Brits and 100k Germans!1 Why?
This is even weirder if we consider that, around that time, France was by far the most populous country in Europe:
So why didn’t France send more settlers to Canada, while England kept sending settlers?
One of the reasons is this:
In most European countries, the population was growing slowly at the time. And rulers knew power came from people: They could farm more food and fight more wars. So they were cautious about sending their subjects elsewhere. For example, Spain sent ~200k people to America from 1492 to the 1650s, and only about 400k by the 1800s. Portugal had sent ~400k. France, about 90k by 1775. These countries actively preempted emigration: Only Catholics could go, for example. Also, the goal was to extract as much value as possible from their colonies, not to settle them. In Latin America, that meant controlling local populations to extract silver and take care of plantations. In Canada, that meant controlling the fur trade, a lot of which could be done by trading with Native Americans.
This was not the case in England. It already had a higher population density than many other European countries before the Black Death of the 1300s. Its population grew faster afterwards. By the early 1700s, England’s population density was among the highest in Europe, and it was causing pressure in farmlands.
But why did it grow so fast? Grain yields seem to have been higher there (and in Germany) than elsewhere in Europe:
It was hard to find information about comparative agricultural productivity across Europe in the 1500-1800 period, but I did find this:
So what happened is that farm productivity was much higher in England2 than in the other imperial powers.3 In a Malthusian world, that translated into a higher population density and a surplus of population, which brought population pressure to farmlands and a push for emigration. By the 1600s, emigration to America was an escape valve for England.4 That wasn’t the case elsewhere in Europe.
You might have noticed that I said France sent ~15k immigrants to Canada by 1700 and ~30k by 1750, but by then, the French population was only 60k. Meanwhile, the British colonies received ~300k immigrants, but by 1750 their population was 1.2M.
Why did the immigrants to the British Colonies multiply by 4 but the ones to French Colonies only multiplied by 2?
One big reason is the timing: British immigrants started arriving much earlier. Remember this graph and look at the left:
Many more people had moved to the British Colonies, much faster. They had more time to reproduce.
It’s also true that the French took a very long time to kick-start their fertility in Canada. In the 1600s:
Approximately two-thirds of the French immigrants returned to the Old World or died unmarried in Canada. Only 3,400 French settled along the St. Lawrence River and laid the foundation for the new colony.—Les Filles du Roi
Why?
The vast majority of migrants were men: soldiers, fur traders, and missionary priests.
Soldiers and missionary priests were men for obvious reasons.
France sent missionaries and priests to expand Catholicism in the Americas, and they took spots that could have gone to women, increasing the sex imbalance. Many of them later returned to France.
Trappers had a very itinerant lifestyle, always moving around to hunt and trade furs. Not a lifestyle conducive to attracting women or forming families at that time.
Without French women, trappers and soldiers tended to pair up with indigenous women, but these pairs didn’t increase the population of the colony. Why?
Intermarriage was encouraged early on because it created ties with locals. But this actually hindered colony growth: Apparently, indigenous women didn’t follow European-style marriages where the nuclear family remained united. They preferred staying with their own tribes, and raised their children as natives, not as French. So much so that, to this day, there’s a recognized Canadian indigenous tribe of Métis, who are mainly descendants from these unions. Many times, the men would follow the women, actually draining the colonies of their population rather than contributing to it. Finally, intermarriages frequently led to disease, since many natives were not immune to infections brought by Europeans.
It was only in 1669 that France sent women—about 800—to reproduce with Canadians. That effort was successful, since most got married and started having babies immediately. At that point, their fertility was as high as the British, but it was too little too late.
The picture in the British colonies was the opposite. British immigrants included more women for a couple of reasons:
Many settlers escaped England because of their religious beliefs: They were Puritans and disagreed with the Church of England. They tended to emigrate in whole families, and continue reproducing once they arrived in the US.
Families also moved together because of headright: The head of household was granted land based on the number of people he brought with him.
The majority of economic activity in the British Colonies was farming, very conducive to settled families, so it attracted many.
The results of all these differences was that in New France before 1670, for every woman, there were 2 to 10 men. In New England, that ratio was 1.5. Virtually all women married in both, but a much higher share of women in the British Colonies meant more children overall.
Couples had a similar fertility rate in New France (around 6 to 9) and New England (around 7 to 10). However, around 40% of children5 died in New France but only 10% to 30% in New England. This meant that two parents would have 5 surviving children in New France, but ~7 in New England. In two generations, that would mean multiplying by 6 in New France but 12 in New England!6
From what I can gather, the main reason was the cold: It could kill children, either by increasing their vulnerability to respiratory infections, or through famine caused by later and scarcer harvests in New France. With a better climate, New England had less of these issues, and fewer of its children died.
Prospective settlers to British Colonies had a very strong incentive to move, and very few barriers to do it.
The British government incentivized emigration. One way was through the headrights I mentioned before. Another was through very liberal concessions of colony rights to private investors.
It also didn’t stop people who wanted to leave England. For example, there was conflict between the Church of England and Puritans in England in the early 1600s, so tens of thousands of Puritans left.
All this gave wings to private initiative looking for returns in America, which could come from many sources:
Trade, mainly timber, furs, fish, and tobacco
Real estate, as land became more valuable with more settlers
Headrights
As a result, investors had an incentive to market to their compatriots the amazing opportunities that could be found in America, and they did. They recruited aggressively in England.
Once settlers landed, the conditions were truly better in New England than England, as it was less crowded, there was much more timber7 for construction, the strong economy and increased scarcity of people meant salaries were higher…8 Through word-of-mouth, they let their friends and family know about the amazing American opportunities, and many more came, and most stayed.
All these conditions were the opposite in New France:
Being a much more centralized country, the French King heavily controlled the settlement of New France. For example, Protestants (Huguenots) were not allowed to emigrate! You had to be a Catholic, upstanding citizen to go.
Once they were there, the opportunities were much more narrow: Either become a trapper or a farmer. This was not very compelling to other Frenchmen, and word-of-mouth did not encourage further settlement.
The government didn’t create a strong incentive structure to emigrate. There was no equivalent to headrights.
Everybody knew that New France was quite cold. Voltaire famously called Canada “a few acres of snow”.
New France was especially not compelling for women, as the lifestyle was less suitable for them.
All these things also meant no private initiative to settle New France. And the French Crown was not especially good at marketing. It was very hard to even gather 800 women to send as Filles du Roi.
This had another consequence. Whereas New France settlers didn’t push aggressively westward, the British ones did: More and more immigrants were coming, and all the best lands were already taken, so the British wanted to push west, to the other side of the Appalachians, to the Ohio River—an area that France claimed as theirs.
France saw the writing on the wall and started building forts along the Great Lakes, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers. Settlers pushing westward started clashing with the French, and that’s what sparked the war.
I’ve touched on this, but it’s worth explaining further: The nature of the economics of New England specifically was very conducive to European immigration in a way that was not true for either New France or even the southern British Colonies like the Carolinas.
Production in New England didn’t require a lot of people, but it did require entrepreneurship. In that area, what grows is crops like wheat and barley, which don’t require lots of labor, just land. So you wanted as much land cultivated as quickly as possible, which required individual initiative, and hence free emigration with land grants (like the headright) was optimal. Since there was an inordinate amount of land to be cultivated, hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived to claim that land.
This was not the case elsewhere. In New France, trapping required very few people, especially since a lot of the hunting was carried out by natives. And the outcome could be controlled, as the sale of these furs was carried out in Europe, so it required shipping.
In Spanish colonies, the first goal was mining. This required lots of workers, who could be easily controlled by owners. This incentivized slavery or indentured servitude—of either natives or African slaves.
Plantations are similar: Plants like cotton and tobacco require a lot of work to cultivate and treat. This fostered big plantations and the slavery trade, both of which were less compelling for poor immigrants who couldn’t afford either the land or the slaves. This is why, within the British Colonies, New England grew much faster than the southern colonies.
So far, I’ve only given you reasons why the local British population in American colonies was much bigger than in New France. But these settlers were not the only ones to fight in the conflicts that emerged between them. Britain and France also sent troops.
Most able-bodied Canadian men fought—about 15,000. That was half the British contingent of about 30,000 locals—of which 20,000 came from Connecticut alone. We already saw why the British colonies could muster stronger forces: a much bigger population.
But on top of this, Britain sent over twice as many troops (20k) as France (~7k regulars plus ~2k marines). Why?
France knew that the British American population was 20x bigger than the Canadian one. It did not hope to win that war. But war bled into Europe, so France actually hoped to win the continental war, in order to demand the restitution of Canada from Britain. Therefore, the force sent to Canada was just a means to strengthen its negotiation power and weaken the British, not to guarantee victory.
On top of that, Britain had emerged earlier in the century as the decisive maritime superpower. It blockaded the American coast, making reinforcements and supplies really hard.
France didn’t have a massive interest in Canada anyways: The colony lost money, whereas its Caribbean colonies made a lot of money through sugar and tobacco.
The weaker French forces, combined with the fact that the British colonies could supply their forces indefinitely, while the Canadians had a much more limited harvest in the north, meant that they were virtually guaranteed to lose.
So if you boil it all down, there were four root causes for why Britain won against France in America, and today most Americans and Canadians speak English and not French:
The agricultural revolution reached England before France
British colonies were farther south than French ones, making them much more productive and compelling
Governance difference: the British had more freedom, so there were more religious emigrants and more private initiative. The incentive of free farmland also drew people. France was too restrictive.
British hegemony in the sea
After conquering Canada, the British did kick a few French-speaking people out of Acadia, but they didn’t do the same in Québec: There was no risk of rebellion because the war had definitively settled the issue of ownership, and removing the French would have utterly destroyed the local economy. Since New Englanders now had plenty of space to expand in the Ohio River Valley, kicking the French out would have just destroyed their production—and taxes.
In fact, the Seven Years War emptied the British coffers, so they raised taxes on the colonies to counterbalance. This was not popular.
Add to that the fact that the British had just trained a new army of settlers and had mixed them across all 13 colonies, making connections between them, and the seed of the American Revolution was planted. It wouldn’t take long: It would start just two years after the end of the Seven Years War. France saw this as an opportunity to get back at Britain; this time it supported the revolutionaries, and within a decade, Britain had lost one of its most profitable colonies.
Canada remained in the hands of Britain and only fully left in 1982. During all this time, it contained the growth of French and English settlers pushed farther west. And this is why North America speaks English and not French.
Next, we will dive into why some people from Alberta (and Saskatchewan) want independence from the rest of Canada, and why Winnipeg is where it is. This will end the Canada series for now.
According to Altman, Ida and Horn, James (eds) (1991), 'To Make America': European Emigration in the Early Modern Period, University of California Press (Berkeley).
Why? This is something I’m going to spend much more time on in the future. For now, you can just read the Wikipedia article on this.
Save for the Netherlands. In fact, from everything I’m reading, I’m reaching the conclusion that the true innovator in everything preceding the Industrial Revolution was the Netherlands.
This was a key trigger of the Industrial Revolution, too.
Defined as either those who died before 15 years of age or before having children.
I’m talking mostly about New England here because the colonies farther south were more problematic. Chesapeake Bay had malaria, for example. There, child mortality rates were higher, and population growth slower.
Most English forests had been either cut or were in the process of being cut by that time.
Wages in England were low because of the overpopulation there. As they arrived, most workers were actually indentured servants, so they had virtually no income. But after that, they could either make more money by working their own fields, or command high wages through the nascent industries in America: cod, timber, wheat, tobacco, indigo, cotton…
2025-05-15 23:30:38
Ice has sculpted Canada’s past. Now that global warming is accelerating, it will thaw in many parts of Canada. Many claim that this will make Canada’s future bright. Is that true? Yes! But it might not be in the fields you think. What will happen to its agriculture? Trade? Energy? Government management? Military? This is what we’re going to explore toda…
2025-05-13 20:03:04
This is the 3rd article of the Canada series:
The first one focused on Canada’s weird population patterns (free)
The second one covered its main geopolitical challenge: facing the US (free)
This one (free) and the next (premium) focus on Canada’s north: How ice has shaped its past and will continue shaping its future
The following articles will be about the internal challenges of Canada:
French Canada: Why it’s French, why no other part of North America is, and whether it will ever be independent (paywalled)
Alberta’s drive for independence (premium)
Subscribe to get them if you haven’t yet!
If we’re going to focus on Canada’s ice, we need to look here:
And this area is really big.
You might know that Canada is the 2nd biggest country in the world, but it’s hard to fathom how huge and far north it is.
You probably know that Canada’s south is pretty far north. Even Toronto, one of the warmest Canadian cities, close to the country’s southern border, is very cold.
Well, here’s a crazy fact: Did you know that Canada’s southernmost point is nearer to Brazil than to its northernmost point?!
And this vast expanse of ice is also extremely wide. Did you know that its easternmost point is nearer to Europe than to its westernmost point?!
This cold expanse is so big we don’t usually know what goes on in its most remote places…
This is mostly the region of Nunavut.
There are barely any trees here.
It’s mostly bare mountains, water, ice, and tundra.
Landscapes seem incredible.
This redditor went there and shared this:
I had the opportunity to go canoeing here last summer (the "Barrenlands" in the northern mainland portion of Nunavut) and I can say it was an absolutely wild and desolate place. It was the height of summer, so the weather was very pleasant, the sun dips below the horizon for a few hours in the middle of the night, but it never got dark. We swam in the river everyday. Lots of wildlife (moose, caribou, grizzlies, wolves, muskox) and great fishing. No trees, just endless rolling green spongey mosses/shrubs and rock stretching to the empty horizon. Hordes of mosquitoes on the non-breezy days. Definitely the most remote and removed locale I have ever traveled to, we didn't see any other humans for 3 weeks along a 300km stretch of river!
But not all the Canadian North is like this. If you go south or east, you might see more taiga, like in this picture of Yukon:
Even in the Canadian Shield, like in southern Ontario:
All in all, this looks fantastic for movies, camping, and adventure trips.
It begs the question though: Why are these the landscapes?
We don’t realize it, but the Great Lakes are an extension of a line of many lakes, including Great Bear Lake, Great Slave Lake, Lake Athabasca, and others.
When you zoom in, you can see something else that’s interesting:
Notice it’s not quite an issue of rain. There’s very little rain in the region of the northern lakes:
You might recognize, however, from the last couple of articles that the white line of big lakes is broadly the limit of the Canadian Shield:
The lakes are between this shield and the coastal ranges, caused by the Pacific Plate hitting the North American Plate:1
You can see that this area, so close to the coastal mountains, lies lower than the rest of the shield. This is common around very tall mountain ranges: Their weight depresses the land around them. They are called foreland basins:
But in these other places in the world, these depressions have formed river valleys (Paraná, Mesopotamia, Indus, Ganges). Why lakes in Canada? Because of glaciations!
In the valleys of the Paraná, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, and Ganges, all the rain from the mountains flows downstream, carrying sediments that accumulate over time, filling any hole. If there’s a shallow sea, they will fill it continuously, the way the Tigris & Euphrates fill the Persian Gulf, and the Ganges fills the Bay of Bengal.
This happened on the Rockies side: You can see that there’s a gentle slope from the Rockies towards the Prairies:
But this transition doesn’t happen on the Canadian Shield. Look at these parts of Finland, Russia, and Canada:
They all have thousands of lakes. Why? Because:
In the far north, it rains less. There is less water to carry sediments.
The ice sheets, with their weight, their movement, and the abrasive ice and stones they carry, dig deep holes in the ground.
They also strip the sediments away, leaving the soil bare, which tends to produce hills and valleys.
The stripped land is more hermetic. Water doesn’t drain, it stays there and ponds.
The sediments carried by glaciers accumulate in some places, forming natural dams.
Sometimes, big pieces of ice can get buried. When this ice later melts, the area collapses, forming another hole for lakes.
The ice pushes the mantle down. When it melts, the land bounces back unevenly, forming peaks and valleys.
This is why Canada hosts a whopping 60% of all of the world’s lakes!2
So why did the lakes accumulate in this precise line then?
On the west side, we have mountains that cause a depression (because mountains are heavy), which is slowly filled with sediments. The lowest part is the one farthest from the mountain ranges—the limit between the sedimentary basin and the Canadian Shield.
On the east side, we have the Canadian Shield, which was heavily weathered by the ice sheets. This weathering was maximal at the edge of the Shield, because this part was lowest, so glaciers would rush there faster and grind them more.
Glaciers left behind more ground-up materials when they receded, forming natural dams. These filled with water, forming vast lakes.
They’re in a line because old cratons tend to have lines and smooth edges.
And how has this geography influenced Canada’s history? Tremendously. Here are two examples.
This is a map of North America in 1700:
Notice Rupert’s Land, at the top, around Hudson Bay. What’s that? Why is it disconnected from other British colonies? Why is there native land between the two?
It’s because this land didn’t really belong to the British Crown. It was controlled by a company—the Hudson Bay Company. Its control was so thorough that it had its own paper money, courts, governor, force... And its land was not just the Hudson Bay’s shores, but the entire Hudson Bay drainage basin.
In 1670, the British Crown granted the Hudson Bay Company a monopoly for the exploitation of the entire watershed of the Hudson Bay. This basin is as big as the EU! And what did they trade? Beaver furs.
Beavers are adapted to live in cold water, so their furs are very warm and waterproof, and also supple enough to be worked into different shapes—like coats and hats.
So trappers could make a lot of money by hunting beavers and selling their furs in Europe. But beavers live in rivers, so trappers had to follow the rivers. The French did the same thing in the St Lawrence River Valley, by the way.
Since this region was so remote, so cold, and didn’t allow for agriculture, it couldn’t host a big population, so Hudson Bay Company (HBC) trappers relied on alliances with natives to source their furs.
This trade was so profitable that it sparked wars that lasted nearly a century! The Beaver Wars, which started around 1610 and ended around 1700, pitted the Iroquois (supported by the British and Dutch) against the French and their allies (Alongquins, Hurons…). The Native Americans sold the beavers in exchange for Western items, notably guns. Thus, the more beavers they sold, the more guns they got, fueling the war. But the more beavers they sold, the more they drove the beaver population towards extinction, pushing trappers westward to access more beavers.
This happened across North America, including in the north with the Hudson Bay Company: The more time passed, the more beavers it caught, the scarcer they became, and the more the HBC had to travel westward for furs. Eventually, in the 1820s, as it pushed west for more furs, the British Crown was tempted to grant more westward territory to the HBC. The eventual trigger was the fact that the US was also pushing westward to gain more territory. The British granted a monopoly on all lands up to the Pacific Coast to the HBC.
Eventually, in the 19th Century, the British Crown absorbed the HBC’s lands and granted them to Canada, making it the country we know today.3 So Canada’s expansion westward was secured by trapper pioneers in the quest for furs—furs valuable because of the ice they protected against. Economics preceded politics, and geography preceded economics.
It is not the only time the fur trade determined the fate of Canada!
Half of Canada’s Pacific coast actually belongs to the US! It’s a pretty pitiful coast, and they don’t even own half of it!
How did the US end up doing a Croatia on Canada?
Here’s a world map in 1860:
Notice that Alaska is part of Russia. And it includes that same piece of coast! Why?
In the late 1700s, Russia had been on a mission of imperial conquest for 600 years. One of the main reasons is because of ice, which makes Siberia inhospitable, so it was relatively easy for Russia to keep moving eastward until it reached the end of Asia. And then, like the paleolithic people who crossed the Bering Strait during the last glaciation, Russia jumped the strait and continued its conquest, into present day Alaska.
But if you own Alaska in the 1800s, you don’t really own anything. It’s a bunch of mountains and snow. What can you get from there?
We’re back to furs! Useful because animals make them to protect from the cold!
In this part of the world, snow and mountains make it virtually impossible to go inland, so the only economic value in the 1800s was on the coast: fishing and furs. Russians went as far south as they could, until they faced opposition from the Spanish and the British. The region they occupied ended up in the hands of the US when it bought Alaska from Russia in 1867.
Why did the Russians sell Alaska to the US? Because the land was too far away, and expansionist Americans and British were about to take it over anyway. They decided to sell it to the US because it was the weaker country and Russia’s bigger enemy at the time was the UK—a European competitor and the most powerful country at that time.
The Pacific coastal border and the expansion through the Hudson Bay Company are not the only ways ice has sculpted Canada’s history, of course. But they beg a question: How will ice shape Canada’s future? Or rather, how will its thawing? Will it open up marvelous new economic opportunities for Canada? Will it turn it into a world superpower? This is what I’ll explore in the next article.
Above 0.1 km2 in size
The Hudson Bay Company is the oldest company in North America, and it just declared bankruptcy a few weeks ago.
