These glacial rafts float, move around and ground with the tides and currents. Flora, fauna and habitats are crushed and scraped by this grinding ice. The sediments may be deeply gouged or completely abraded away over large areas. Although the damage can be extensive and severe in some years, the recovery is usually rapid. By mid summer ice-scoured and untouched mudflats are usually indistinguishable in appearance and in numbers and types of animals.
Severe storms can have a far more devastating and lasting effect on the mudflats.
We have a good idea of the ecological destruction that these storms can wreak, thanks to the fact that researchers from Acadia University have studied Minas Basin mudflats for decades. Thus they had a good idea of what particular intertidal areas looked like before a major storm roared through the region in 1975. Windrows of dead clams and amphipods appeared on nearby beaches and saltmarshes. Because such large areas were devastated, recovery was slow. Not all storms that pass through the Bay of Fundy are quite so devastating.