Ellesmere Island
Ellesmere Island is Canada's northernmost and third largest island, and the tenth largest in the world. It comprises an area of, slightly smaller than Great Britain, and the total length of the island is.
Lying within the Arctic Archipelago, Ellesmere Island is considered part of the Queen Elizabeth Islands. Cape Columbia at is the most northerly point of land in Canada and one of the most northern points of land on the planet.
The Arctic Cordillera mountain system covers much of Ellesmere Island, making it the most mountainous in the Arctic Archipelago. More than one-fifth of the island is protected as Quttinirpaaq National Park.
In 2021, the population of Ellesmere Island was recorded at 144. There are three settlements: Alert, Eureka, and Grise Fiord. Ellesmere Island is administered as part of the Qikiqtaaluk Region in the Canadian territory of Nunavut.
Geology
Ellesmere Island has three major geological regions. The Grant Land Highlands is a large belt of fold mountains which dominate the northern face of the island. It is part of the Franklinian mobile belt, a zone of Cretaceous volcanic and intrusive rock. South of this is the Greely-Hazen Plateau, a large tableland composed of sedimentary and volcanic rocks. Covering most of the island, the coastal sedimentary plateau is a succession of highly eroded sedimentary peaks which are part of the Franklinian Shield with an extension of the Canadian Shield in the island's southeastern corner. In addition, there are syntectonic clastics which comprise the Ellesmere Island Volcanics of the Sverdrup Basin Magmatic Province.A period of uplift and faulting prior to the Pleistocene epoch established the overall features of the island. Additional uplift occurred due to isostatic rebound following the last glacial period. Land features were then shaped by erosion from glacial ice, meltwaters, and scouring by sea ice.
History
It is believed that each of the pre-contact peoples who migrated through the High Arctic approached Ellesmere Island from the south and west. They were able to travel along Ellesmere's coasts or overland to Nares Strait, and some of them crossed the strait to populate Greenland.The archaeological record of past Arctic cultures is quite complete, as artefacts deteriorate very slowly. Items exposed to the cold, dry winds become naturally freeze-dried while items that become buried are preserved in the permafrost. Artefacts are in a similar condition to when they were left or lost, and settlements abandoned thousands of years ago can be seen much as they were the day their inhabitants left. From these sites and artefacts, archaeologists have been able to construct a history of these cultures. However, the research is incomplete and only a small proportion of the details of excavations have been published.
Small tool cultures
The Arctic small tool tradition peoples in the High Arctic had small populations organized as hunting bands, spread from Axel Heiberg Island to the northern extremity of Greenland, where the Independence I culture was active from 2700 BCE. On Ellesmere, they chiefly hunted in the Eureka Upland and the Hazen Plateau. Six different small-tool cultures have been identified at the Smith Sound region: Independence I, Independence I / Saqqaq, Pre-Dorset, Saqqaq, early Dorset, and late Dorset. They chiefly hunted muskoxen: more than three-quarters of their known archeological sites on Ellesmere are located in the island's interior and their winter dwellings were skin tents, suggesting a need for mobility to follow the herds. There is evidence at Lake Hazen of a trade network, including soapstone lamps from Greenland and incised lance heads from cultures to the south.Thule culture
The Thule moved into the High Arctic at the time of a warming trend, c. 1000 CE. Their major population centre was the Smith Sound area due to its proximity to polynyas and its position on transportation routes. From settlements at Smith Sound, the Thule sent summer hunting parties to harvest marine mammals in Nansen Strait. Their summer camps are evidenced by tent rings as far north as Archer Fiord, with clusters of stone dwellings around Lady Franklin Bay and at Lake Hazen which suggest semi-permanent occupations.The Thule genetically and culturally completely replaced the Dorset people some time after 1300 CE. The Thule displaced the small-tool cultures, having a number of technological advantages which notably included effective weapons, kayaks and umiaks for hunting marine mammals, and sled dogs for surface transport and pursuit. The Thule also had an extensive trade network, evidenced by meteoritic iron from Greenland which was exported through Ellesmere Island to the rest of the archipelago and to the North American mainland.
More than fifty Norse artefacts have been found in Thule archeological sites on the Bache Peninsula, including pieces of chain mail. It is uncertain if Ellesmere Island was directly visited by Norse Greenlanders who sailed from the south or if the items were traded through a network of middlemen. It is also possible the items may have been taken from a shipwreck. A bronze set of scales discovered in western Ellesmere Island has been interpreted as indicating the presence of a Norse trader in the region. The Norse artefacts date from c. 1250 to 1400 CE.
Between 1400 and 1600 CE, the Little Ice Age developed and conditions for hunting became increasingly difficult, forcing the Thule to withdraw from Ellesmere and the other northern islands of the archipelago. The Thule who remained in northern Greenland became isolated, specialized at hunting a diminishing number of game animals, and lost the ability to make boats. Thus, the waters around Ellesmere were not navigated again until the arrival of large European vessels after 1800.
Early European exploration
Much of the initial phase of European exploration of the North American Arctic was centred on a search for the Northwest Passage and undertaken by Britain. The 1616 expedition of William Baffin were the first Europeans to record sighting the then-unnamed Ellesmere Island. However, the onset of the Little Ice Age interrupted the progress of explorations for two centuries.In 1818, an ice jam in Baffin Bay broke, allowing European vessels access to the High Arctic. Baffin Bay was then navigable in the summers due to the presence of an ice dam in Smith Sound, which prevented Arctic drift ice from flowing south. The other channels of the archipelago remained congested with ice.
That year, John Ross led the first recorded European expedition to Cape York, at which time there were reportedly only 140 Inughuit. Knowledge of Ellesmere persisted in the oral histories of the Inuit of Baffin Island and the Inughuit of northern Greenland, who each called it.
Euro-American exploration and contact
The search for Franklin's lost expedition – also searching for the Northwest Passage and to establish claims to the Far North – involved more than forty expeditions to the High Arctic over two decades, and represented the peak period of Euro-American Arctic exploration. Edward Augustus Inglefield led an 1852 expedition which surveyed the coastlines of Baffin Bay and Smith Sound, being stopped by ice in Nares Strait. He named Ellesmere Island for the president of the Royal Geographical Society, Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere. The Second Grinnell expedition made slightly further progress before becoming trapped in the ice. Over two winters the expedition charted both sides of Kane Basin to about 80°N, from where Elisha Kent Kane claimed to have sighted the conjectured Open Polar Sea.During this period, as the Little Ice Age abated and the hunting of marine mammals became more feasible again, Aboriginal peoples began to return to Ellesmere Island. The most well-known of these migrations in both Inuit and European accounts is the journey of Qitlaq, who led a group of Inuit families from Baffin Island to northwestern Greenland, via Ellesmere Island, in the 1850s. This journey reestablished contact between Inuit who had been separated for two centuries and reintroduced vital technologies to the Inughuit. Other groups followed and by the 1870s Inuit were living on Ellesmere Island and had regular contact with those on the neighbouring islands.
Contact between Inuit and Europeans or Americans was often indirect, as the Inuit happened upon shipwrecks or abandoned base camps which provided wood and metal resources. European goods were also obtained through inter-group trade. Long-term contact began in the 1800s through whaling stations and trading posts, which frequently relocated. Euro-American expeditions employed Inughuit, Inuit and west Greenlander guides, hunters and labourers, gradually blending their knowledge with European technology to conduct effective exploration.
File:Ship under Cape Prescott - 1875.jpg|thumb|HMS Alert off Cape Prescott in 1875
British and United States Arctic expeditions had been interrupted for some years due to the priorities of the Crimean War and the American Civil War, respectively. By about 1860, the focus of Arctic exploration had shifted to the North Pole. As earlier attempts at the pole via Svalbard or eastern Greenland had reached impasses, numerous expeditions came to Ellesmere Island to pursue the route through Nares Straight.
The United States 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; it has since been estimated to have covered. The ice shelf broke apart in the 20th century, presumably due to climate change.