Pikialasorsuaq (the North Water Polynya)

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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.