Ellesmere Island is part of the Qikiqtaaluk Region of the Canadian
territory of Nunavut. Lying within the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, it is
considered part of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, with Cape Columbia being the
most northerly point of land in Canada. It comprises an area of 196,235 km2 and
the total length of the island is 830 kilometres, making it the world's tenth
largest island and Canada's third largest island. The Arctic Cordillera
mountain system covers much of Ellesmere Island, making it the most mountainous
in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The Arctic willow is the only woody species
to grow on Ellesmere Island. History
The first human inhabitants of Ellesmere Island were small bands drawn to the
area for Peary caribou, muskox, and marine mammal hunting about 2000–1000
BCE. As was the case for the Dorset 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.
Vikings from the Greenland colonies reached Ellesmere Island, Skraeling
Island, and Ruin Island during hunting expeditions and trading with the Inuit
groups. Unusual structures on Bache peninsula may be the remains of a
late-period Dorset stone longhouse. The first European to sight the island
after the height of 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. The US expedition led by Adolphus Greely in
1881 crossed the island from east to west, establishing Fort Conger in the
northern part of the island. 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. The Ellesmere Ice Shelf was documented
by the British Arctic Expedition of 1875–76, in which Lieutenant Pelham
Aldrich's party went from Cape Sheridan west to Cape Alert, including the Ward
Hunt Ice Shelf. In 1906 Robert Peary led an expedition in northern Ellesmere
Island, from Cape Sheridan along the coast to the western side of Nansen
Sound. During Peary's expedition, the Ice Shelf was continuous; a modern
estimate is that it covered 8,900 km2. In 2011, Jon Turk and Erik Boomer
completed the first known circumnavigation of Ellesmere Island.
Geography Ellesmere Island is separated to the
east by Nares Strait from Greenland, to the west by Eureka Sound and Nansen
Sound from Axel Heiberg Island, and to the south by Jones Sound and Cardigan
Strait from Devon Island. Ellesmere Island contains Canada's
northernmost point, Cape Columbia at 83°6′41″N.
= Protected areas= More than one-fifth of the island is
protected as Quttinirpaaq National Park, which includes seven fjords and a
variety of glaciers, as well as Lake Hazen, North America's largest lake
north of the Arctic Circle. Barbeau Peak, the highest mountain in Nunavut is
located in the British Empire Range on Ellesmere Island. The most northern
mountain range in the world, the Challenger Mountains, is located in the
northeast region of the island. The northern lobe of the island is called
Grant Land. In July 2007, a study noted the
disappearance of habitat for waterfowl, invertebrates, and algae on Ellesmere
Island. According to John P. Smol of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario,
and Marianne S. V. Douglas of the University of Alberta in Edmonton,
warming conditions and evaporation have caused low water levels and changes in
the chemistry of ponds and wetlands in the area. The researchers noted that "In
the 1980s they often needed to wear hip waders to make their way to the
ponds...while by 2006 the same areas were dry enough to burn."
= 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, and the Northern Ellesmere icefields.
The northwest coast of Ellesmere Island was covered by a massive, 500 km long
ice shelf until the 20th century. The Ellesmere Ice Shelf shrank by 90 percent
in the twentieth century due to warming trends in the Arctic, particularly in
the 1930s and 1940s, a period when the largest ice islands were formed leaving
the separate Alfred Ernest, Ayles, Milne, Ward Hunt, and Markham Ice
Shelves. A 1986 survey of Canadian ice shelves found that 48 km2 or 3.3 km3 of
ice calved from the Milne and Ayles ice shelves between 1959 and 1974. The Ward
Hunt Ice Shelf, the largest remaining section of thick landfast sea ice along
the northern coastline of Ellesmere Island, lost 600 km of ice in a massive
calving in 1961–1962. It further decreased by 27% in thickness between
1967 and 1999. The breakup of the Ellesmere Ice Shelves
has continued in the 21st century: the Ward Ice Shelf experienced a major
breakup during summer 2002; the Ayles Ice Shelf calved entirely on August 13,
2005; the largest breakoff of the ice shelf in 25 years, it may pose a threat
to the oil industry in the Beaufort Sea. The piece is 66 km2. In April 2008, it
was discovered that the Ward Hunt shelf was fractured, with dozens of deep,
multi-faceted cracks and in September 2008 the Markham shelf completely broke
off to become floating sea-ice. = Paleontology=
Schei and later Nathorst described the Paleocene-Eocene fossil forest in the
Stenkul Fiord sediments. The Stenkul Fiord site represents a series of
deltaic swamp and floodplain forests. The trees stood for at least 400 years.
Individual stumps and stems of >1 m diameter were abundant, and are
identified as Metasequoia and possibly Glyptostrobus. Well preserved Pliocene
peats containing abundant vertebrate and plant macrofossils characteristic of a
boreal forest have been reported from Strathcona Fiord.
In 2006, University of Chicago paleontologist Neil Shubin and Academy
of Natural Sciences paleontologist Ted Daeschler reported the discovery of the
fossil of a Paleozoic 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, birds, and mammals, including humans.
In 2011, Jason P. Downs and co-authors described the sarcopterygian
Laccognathus embryi from specimens collected from the same locality that
Tiktaalik was found. = Insect ecology=
Ellesmere Island is noted as being the northernmost occurrence of eusocial
insects; specifically, the bumblebee Bombus polaris. There is a second
species of bumblebee occurring there, Bombus hyperboreus, which is a parasite
in the nests of B. polaris. Population
In 2006, the population of Ellesmere Island was recorded as 146. There are
three settlements on Ellesmere Island, Alert, Eureka, and Grise Fiord.
Politically, it is part of the Qikiqtaaluk Region.
Canadian Forces Station 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 approximately 65 civilians and military personnel.
Eureka, which is the third northernmost settlement in the world, consists of
three areas, "Eureka Aerodrome" which includes "Fort Eureka", the Environment
Canada Weather Station, and the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research
Laboratory, formerly the Arctic Stratospheric Ozone Observatory. Eureka
has the lowest average annual temperature and least precipitation of
any weather station in Canada. In popular culture
In the 2013 American superhero film Man of Steel, Ellesmere Island was the site
of a combined US-Canadian scientific expedition to recover an ancient
Kryptonian spaceship buried in the glacial ice pack.
The island was the location for the 2014 BBC programme Snow Wolf Family and Me.
See also References
Further reading Mech L. David, Brandenburg Jim,"Life in
the High Arctic " National Geography June 1988, vol.1973,no. 6, pp.750-767.
External links Ellesmere Island in the Atlas of Canada
- Toporama; Natural Resources Canada Mountains on Ellesmere Island
Detailed map, northern Ellesmere Island, including named capes, points, bays, and
offshore islands by Geoffrey Hattersley-Smith