The Canadian communities battling it out for tide range world record

For visitors to Burntcoat Head Park in Nova Scotia, a scramble along the russet shoreline of the Atlantic is a pilgrimage to the site of one of the planet's great natural wonders.

- Leyland Cecco

Twice a day, more than 100bn tons of seawater fills and drains the Bay of Fundy - a figure comparable to the combined flow of all the world's freshwater rivers.

For that reason, the community has long and proudly proclaimed their far-reaching tides as the world's highest - a claim confirmed by Guinness World Records.

But a row has broken out over those claims, with a northern Canadian community claiming that new data - and longstanding local knowledge suggests their tides rise higher.

"All we hear is about how the Bay of Fundy has the highest tides," says Adamie Delisle Alaku, who lives in the Nunavik region of Quebec and is the executive vicepresident of Makivvik's department of environment, wildlife and research. "Kudos to them for all the work they've done to promote it and we mean them no ill will - but the reality is, ours are higher." Makivvik, the organisation that represents the interests of the Inuit in Nunavik, said this month that the community of Tasiujaq would assume "its rightful place" as the location of the world's highest average tidal range after fresh data found their tides reached nearly 2 metres higher than those of Burntcoat Head Park.