Three hundred kilometres east of Halifax, Nova Scotia, lies a crescent-shaped island of sand 42 kilometres long by just 1.4 kilometres wide at low tide. Everything on this island – plants, animals, insects, the dunes themselves – is driven by the harsh influences of its foggy marine world where, over the centuries, this sliver of sand sculpted by churning seas and angry winds has been the graveyard of the Atlantic. Since 1583 there have been over 350 known shipwrecks on the island’s sand bars.