Ellesmere Island
| Ellesmere Island | |
|---|---|
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|
| Waters | Arctic Ocean |
| Archipelago | Queen Elizabeth Islands |
| Geographical location | 79 ° N , 80 ° W |
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| length | 820 km |
| width | 440 km |
| surface | 196,236 km² |
| Highest elevation |
Barbeau Peak 2616 m |
| Residents | 146 (2006) <1 inh / km² |
| main place | Grise Fiord |
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Ellesmere Island ( German Ellesmere Island ; Inuktitut Umingmak Nuna , "Land of the Musk Ox ") is the northernmost and largest island of the Queen Elizabeth Islands of Canada in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and is part of the Canadian territory of Nunavut . With a size of 196,236 km 2 , it is the third largest island in Canada and the tenth largest island on earth.
Adolphus Greely (1844–1935), Otto Sverdrup (1854–1939) and Walter Elmer Ekblaw (1882–1949) contributed significantly to the knowledge of Ellesmere Iceland . In modern times, Geoffrey Hattersley-Smith (1923–2012) was a pioneer of modern Arctic research as a geologist and glaciologist.
geography
The 820 km long and 440 km wide island is separated in the east by the Nares Strait from North Greenland , and in the northeast to the northern tip of this island the Lincoln Sea . Nansen Sound and Eureka Sound separate Ellesmere from Axel-Heiberg-Insel in the west. The open Arctic Ocean borders in the north , so that Ellesmere is the last island in the Arctic Archipelago towards the North Pole.
The surface of the island is almost half glaciated and covered by several ice flow networks : in the south the Manson Icefield (6,200 km²) and the South Cape (3,700 km²), in the middle the Prince of Wales Mountains (20,700 km²) and the Agassiz ice cap ( 21,000 km²) and in the north the Northern Ellesmere Icefield (24,400 km²).
The coastline of the island is characterized by numerous fjords . Mountains of the Arctic Cordillera stretch across large parts of the island . The northernmost point of the island, Cape Columbia at 83 ° 6 'N, is also the northernmost point of Canada and 769 km from the North Pole .
Large ice shelf areas arise where powerful glacier tongues or inland ice masses extend far from the mainland into the sea, e.g. B. in Antarctica and Greenland. In contrast to this, ice sheets of sea ice ( fixed ice ) up to 80 m thick have formed in several places along the north coast of Ellesmere Island . Research has shown that the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is up to 3000 years old. Due to climate change and the polar drift of the Arctic ice cap, which is only a few meters thick, along the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, parts of the ice shelf were integrated into the polar pack ice in 1961/62 and migrated with the pack ice as ice islands for many years. Other parts of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf collapsed in the summer of 2002. The ice shelf around Ellesmere Island has decreased by several hundred square kilometers over the past 50 years. Since the island was first explored in 1906, the ice shelf has shrunk by about 90%. Scientists assume that this process will continue in the context of global warming . The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is part of the Quttinirpaaq National Park.
In the north of the island, Grant Land , the peaks of several mountain ranges consisting of sedimentary rock , such as the Challenger Mountains or the British Empire Range , protrude from the up to 900 m thick layer of ice. There is the Barbeau peak , the highest mountain on the island at 2,616 m and at the same time in the Nunavut territory. To the south, the landscape flattens out a little with the Hazen Plateau . The located there Lake Hazen is the largest lake in the Arctic . The terrain then rises again up to 2,000 m.
population
To the south of the island of Ellesmere is the Grise Fiord settlement , which had a population of 129 in 2011. The permanently manned weather station Eureka with the Arctic Stratospheric Ozone Observatory (AStrO) and the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) is 480 km north of it. The Alert military base of the Canadian Air Force , whose crew is reported to be around 55 soldiers and 5 civilians, is located 800 km north-northeast of Grise Fiord.
Climate, flora and fauna
The climate and vegetation vary greatly on Ellesmere Island. The coastal areas are mostly classic cold deserts . Due to frequent fog and the resulting lack of radiation in the short arctic summer, there is largely a lack of higher vegetation, and the areas often leave an impression of desert. In the northern half of Ellesmere Island, however, there is a climatic favorable area surrounded by high mountains, to which the protective mountains on the adjacent island of Axel Heiberg to the west also contribute. This 10,000 km² area extends from Eureka via Tanquary to Lake Hazen. Since the sun stays above the horizon for more than three months, the air and ground temperatures are correspondingly high. The long-term July mean air temperature measured at the official weather stations since 1947 is between 5 and 8.5 ° C, and the daily maxima of the air temperature can reach values of up to 18 ° C. With sufficient water supply (backwater over permafrost , meltwater) and correspondingly nutrient-rich soils, challenging vegetation with over 100 types of vascular plants can develop in this favorable area, which is only around 1000 km from the North Pole. From mid-July to mid-August, the tundra blooms in appropriately favorable locations , with u. a. Arctic willow , the Arctic poppy , four-edged scales Heide (Lily Heath), numerous saxifrage species, lice herbs , Schmalblättrigem cotton grass , stalks Losem Campion and White Mountain Avens . This also allows for a rich wildlife. The fauna includes musk ox , caribou , arctic fox , arctic wolves , arctic hare , lemmings and various species of birds such as snowy owls , gyrfalcons and Canada geese . This part of the island has been under nature protection as the Quttinirpaaq National Park since 1988 .
history
The island was settled by Inuit ancestors at least 4000 years ago . Around the year 1000 AD it may have been visited by a Viking expedition led by Leif Eriksson .
In modern times, the island was discovered in 1616 by William Baffin and Robert Bylot . It is not known whether Baffin ended up on Ellesmere Island, or on the neighboring islands of Coburg Island or Devon Island . In 1818 she was sighted by John Ross . The first secured landing was carried out on the south coast in 1849 by the whaler John Gravill . In 1852 Inglefield's expedition named it after Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere , then President of the Royal Geographical Society .
In 1922 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police opened an outpost on Craig Harbor on the south coast. In 1956 this settlement moved to the Grise Fiord, where several Inuit families were settled. From 1926 to 1933 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police also maintained a post on the Bache Peninsula , at the time the world's northernmost permanent settlement. With the beginning of the Cold War , two weather stations were set up on the island as part of Operation Nanook : first Eureka (1947) and then Alert (1950), which was later expanded into a military base. Alert, located on the north coast at 82 ° 30 ′ N, is the northernmost permanently inhabited human settlement.
paleontology
In 2006, the only fossils of the Tiktaalik , a meat-flosser that is a link between fish and land-dwellers, were found in the sedimentary rock of Ellesmere Island . Also important are the fossil remains of the Margaret Formation , which make it possible to reconstruct a biotope that existed in the Eocene around 50 million years ago under subtropical climatic conditions.
literature
- Nunavut Handbook , Iqaluit 2004, ISBN 0-9736754-0-3 (English).
- Lyle Dick: Muskox Land: Ellesmere Island in the age of contact. University of Calgary Press, Calgary 2001 ( limited preview in Google Book Search, English).
- Noel Humphreys, Edward Shackleton, AW Moore, R. Bentham, D. Haig-Thomas, AJ Wilmott, Percy Cox, HE, Colonel Vanier, HR Mill: Oxford University Ellesmere Land Expedition. In: Geographical Journal . Volume 87, No. 5, 1936. pp. 385-443 ( restricted preview , English).
- Edward Shackleton: Arctic Journeys - The Story of the Oxford University Ellesmere Land Expedition 1934-1935. Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., London 1937, and Farrar & Rinehart, New York 1938 (English).
Web links
- Glaciers in the arctic (Page 108), pdf (4.72 MB)
- The Oxford University Ellesmere Land Expedition .
- Icy outpost of Europe in northern Canada.
- Axel Bojanowski : Geological puzzle: researchers discover the world's northernmost spring . Spiegel Online, June 23, 2014
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Ellesmere Island ( English, French ) In: The Canadian Encyclopedia .
- ^ A b Geoffrey Hattersley-Smith: North of Latitude Eighty. The Defense Research Board in Ellesmere Island . Ottawa, 121 pp., 1974 (English).
- ↑ Grise Fiord Census Profile. Statistics Canada, accessed April 7, 2020 .
- ↑ Eureka Observatory, Canada. International Arctic Systems for Observing the Atmosphere, accessed April 7, 2020 .
- ^ Canadian Forces Station Alert. (No longer available online.) Royal Canadian Airforce, archived from the original on September 24, 2015 ; accessed on September 18, 2015 (English).
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^ Dietrich Barsch, Lorenz King (Ed.): Results of the Heidelberg-Ellesmere Island Expedition . (= Heidelberg Geographical Works . Volume 69, 1981) with articles, illustrations and further references on the following topics:
- Ellesmere Island Discovery and Geographical Names, pp. 15–33,
- Climate of Ellesmere Island, pp. 77-107,
- Glaciology of Ellesmere Island, pp. 233–267,
- Flora pp. 541-553,
- Moose, pp. 555-558,
- Fauna, pp. 565-567.
- ^ William James Mills: Exploring Polar Frontiers: A Historical Encyclopedia . tape 1 . ABC-CLIO, 2003, ISBN 1-57607-422-6 , pp. 209 f . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ Jaelyn J. Eberle and David R. Greenwood: Life at the top of the greenhouse Eocene world - A review of the Eocene flora and vertebrate fauna from Canada's High Arctic. Geological Society of America Bulletin; January / February 124 (1/2), 2012, pp. 3–23