Thirty-six thousand Canadian islands fence the polar ocean
Canada's Arctic Archipelago scatters 36,563 islands across about 1,424,500 square kilometres north of the mainland, most of it in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. After Greenland it is the largest high-Arctic landmass on Earth, yet only 11 of its islands are inhabited, home in 2021 to 23,073 people.
The islands stretch some 2,400 kilometres from east to west and 1,900 kilometres north from the mainland to Cape Columbia, the tip of Ellesmere Island. The Beaufort Sea bounds them on the west, the Arctic Ocean on the northwest, Greenland, Baffin Bay and Davis Strait on the east, and Hudson Bay on the south, with channels threading between them. Ninety-four rank as major islands, each over 130 square kilometres, and twenty exceed 5,000. Greenland, far bigger on its own, is not part of the group.
Paleo-Eskimo peoples crossed from the mainland around 2500 BCE, the first humans to live there. Over the five centuries from 1000 to 1500 CE, the Thule took their place. Those newcomers were the ancestors of today's Inuit, whose small coastal settlements on the southern islands hold most of the sparse population. Baffin Island, the largest, has 13,309 residents, about 56.5 per cent of everyone in the archipelago and more than a third of Nunavut's people. Outside the mountains, tundra covers most of the ground.
Britain's claim, the British Arctic Territories, rested on Martin Frobisher's voyages of the 1570s. From 1870 to 1880 Canada governed only the islands draining into Foxe Basin, Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait, until Britain handed over the rest in 1880. In 1895 almost the whole archipelago became the District of Franklin. Warming reaches here too: some computer estimates say melting in the islands will add 3.5 centimetres to global sea level by 2100.
Source: Arctic Archipelago
