Pikialasorsuaq (the North Water Polynya)

Assembled from 13 blocks · 1 evidence · 21 related

1. Story
2. The largest and most productive recurrent polynya in the Arctic, lying in northern Baffin Bay between Ellesmere Island and northwest Greenland. It opens each spring far earlier than the surrounding pack and stays open through much of the winter, and it has done so for long enough that the Inuit settlement pattern of both coasts is arranged around it. Its Inuktitut name means, roughly, the great upwelling. Beluga, narwhal, walrus, bearded and ringed seals, polar bears and enormous seabird colonies concentrate there, and the communities of Qaanaaq in Greenland and Grise Fiord and Resolute in Nunavut depend on it. In 2016-17 an Inuit-led commission proposed an Inuit-managed protected area covering it - a governance model in which the people who use a place administer it rather than being consulted about it.
3. Knowledge
4. Polynya
5. Pikialasorsuaq (the North Water Polynya)
6. Connections
7. Polynya
8. Inuit
9. Sea Ice
10. Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW)
11. Pikialasorsuaq (the North Water Polynya)
12. Evidence
13. An Inuit-led commission convened by the Inuit Circumpolar Council consulted communities on both sides of the North Water polynya and recommended an Inuit-managed protected area with a free-travel zone between Greenland and Canada, on the basis that the polynya is a single ecological and cultural system divided by an international boundary. V55 VERIFICATION BASIS: not opened during production; no research channel was available. The report title and date rest on the producer's prior knowledge and require confirmation; no recommendation is quoted verbatim.