Grand Banks

The Grand Banks are a group of submarine plateaus on the continental shelf southeast of Newfoundland where the cold Labrador Current meets the warm Gulf Stream, producing one of the richest cod fishing grounds in the Atlantic. European fleets, English, French, Portuguese, and Basque, worked the banks for salt cod from the early sixteenth century. The fishery collapsed under industrial trawling, and Canada imposed the Northern Cod moratorium on 2 July 1992, closing the inshore and offshore cod fishery.