Ellesmere Island
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Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada. |
Ellesmere Island (
French:
Île d'Ellesmere) lying in the
Canadian territory of
Nunavut, is the most northerly of the
Canadian Arctic islands. It comprises an area of
196,235 km² (75,767 square miles), making it the
world's tenth largest island and
Canada's third largest island.
The first inhabitants of Ellesmere Island were small bands of
Inuit drawn to the area for
Peary Caribou,
muskox, and
marine mammal hunting about 1000-2000 BC.
As was the case for the
Dorset (or Palaeoeskimo) hunters and the pioneering Neoeskimos, the Post-Ruin Island and
Late Thule culture Inuit used the
Bache Peninsula region extensively both summer and winter until environmental, ecological and possibly social circumstances caused the area to be abandoned. It was the last region in the Canadian High Arctic to be depopulated during the "
Little Ice Age," attesting to its general economic importance as part of the Smith Sound culture sphere of which it was occasionally a part and sometimes the principal settlement component.
[Late Thule culture developments on the central east coast of Ellesmere Island. Schledermann, P. McCullough, K.M. Copenhagen, Denmark : Danish Polar Center, 2003.] Vikings, likely from the
Greenland colonies, reached Ellesmere Island,
Skraeling Island and Ruin Island during hunting expeditions and trading with the Inuit groups.
[Inuit-Norse contact in the Smith Sound region / Schledermann, P. McCullough, K.M.] Unusual structures on Bache peninsula may be the remains of a late-period Dorset stone longhouse.
[Peter Schlederman, " Eskimo and Viking Finds in the High Arctic ", National Geographic Magazine, Vol. 159, No. 5, May 1981:584 ]The first European to sight the island after the "Little Ice Age," was
William Baffin, in
1616. Ellesmere Island was named in
1852 by
Edward Inglefield's expedition after
Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere.
["Ellesmere Island" from "The Canadian Encyclopedia Online". URL accessed April 7, 2006.] The
American expedition led by
Augustus Greely in 1881 crossed the island from east to west.
The Greely expedition found fossil forests on Ellesmere Island in the late 1880s. Stenkul Fiord was first explored in 1902 by Per Schei, a member of
Otto Sverdrup's 2nd Norwegian Polar Expedition.
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A satellite image of the northern segment of Ellesmere Island, Nunavut. Greenland is to the east. |
Protected areas
More than one-fifth of the island is protected as
Quttinirpaaq National Park (formerly Ellesmere Island National Park), which includes seven
fjords and a variety of
glaciers, as well as
Lake Hazen, the world's largest lake north of the
Arctic Circle.
Barbeau Peak, the highest mountain in Nunavut (2,616 m, 8,593 ft) is located in the
British Empire Range on Ellesmere Island. The most northern
mountain range in the world, the
United States Range is located in the northeast region of the island. The northern lobe of the island is called
Grant Land.
Glaciers and ice caps
Large portions of Ellesmere Island are covered with glaciers and ice, with Manson Icefield and Sydkap in the south; Prince of Wales Icefield and Agassiz Ice Cap along the central-east side of the island, along with substantial ice cover in Northern Ellesmere Island. Along the northwest coast of Ellesmere Island are some
ice shelves, including the Ward Hunt ice shelf which experienced major breakup during summer 2002.
Paleontology
Schei and later
Nathorst [Nathorst, A. G. 1915. Tertiare Pflanzenreste Aus Ellesmere-Land. Report of the Second Norwegian Arctic Expedition in the Fram, 1898-1902. The Society of Arts and Sciences of Kristiania. No. 35.] described the
Paleocene-
Eocene (ca. 55 Ma)
fossil forest in the Stenkul Fiord sediments. The Stenkul Fiord site represents a series of
deltaic swamp and
floodplain forests
[Kalkreuth, W.D., C.L. Riediger, D.J. McIntyre, R.J.H. Richardson, M.G. Fowler & D. Marchioni. 1996. Petrological, palynological and geochemical characteristics of Eureka Sound Group coals (Stenkul Fiord, southern Ellesmere Island, Arctic Canada). Int. J. Coal Sci. 30: 151-182.]. The trees stood for at least 400 years. Individual stumps and stems of >1 m (>3 ft) diameter were abundant. Abundance of
Metasequoia and possibly
Glyptostrobus trees. [
1]
In 2006,
University of Chicago paleontologist Neil H. Shubin reported the discovery of the fossil of a
Paleozoic (ca. 375 Ma) fish, named
Tiktaalik roseae, in the former
stream beds of Ellesmere Island. The fossil exhibits many characteristics of fish, but also indicates a
transitional creature that may be a predecessor of
amphibians,
reptiles and
dinosaurs.
In
2001, the population of Ellesmere Island was recorded as 168. There are three settlements on Ellesmere Island including
Alert,
Eureka, and
Grise Fiord. Politically, it is part of the
Qikiqtaaluk Region.
Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Alert is the
northernmost settlement in the world. With the end of the
Cold War and the advent of new technologies allowing for remote interpretation of data, the overwintering population has been reduced to 50.
Eureka, which is the second northernmost settlement in the world, consists of three areas, the "airport" which includes "Fort Eureka" (the quarters for military personnel maintaining the island's communications equipment), the
Environment Canada Weather Station and the Polar Environmental Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL), formally the Arctic Stratospheric Ozone (AStrO) Observatory.
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Satellite image montage showing Ellesmere Island and its neighbours |
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Mountains on Ellesmere Island*
Year 2004 photos of the Arctic icecap around Ellesmere Island
