Frobisher Bay
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Frobisher Bay is a relatively large inlet of the Labrador Sea in the southeastern corner of Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada. Its length is about 230 km and its width varies from about 40 km at its outlet into the Labrador Sea to roughly 20 km towards its inner end.[1]
The capital of Nunavut, Iqaluit (known as Frobisher Bay until 1987), lies near the innermost end of the Bay.
Frobisher Bay has a tapered shape formed by two flanking peninsulae, the Hall Peninsula to the northeast, and the Meta Incognita Peninsula to the southwest. The Bay's funnellike shape ensures that the tidal variance at Iqaluit each day is about 7 to 11 m. This shape is due to the large outlet glacier centred over Foxe Basin during the Pleistocene glaciation, which gouged the Bay's basin, now flooded by the sea.[1]
Within Frobisher Bay itself are a number of bays, inlets and sounds. Among these are Wayne Bay and Ward Inlet (up towards the far northwestern end), and also Newell Sound, Leach Bay and Kneeland Bay (along the southwest shore). Hamlen Bay, Newton Fiord, Royer Cove and Waddell Bay are to be found in the northeast shore. Indeed, Frobisher Bay's whole coastline is marked with innumerable narrow inlets into which flow many small streams. There are high cliffs on both shores, rising to roughly 330 m on the northeast shore, and twice that on the southwest shore as a result of the tilting of the earth's crust locally during the early Tertiary.[1]
Frobisher Bay is also studded with islands. These include Hill Island and Faris Island near Iqaluit, Pugh, Pike, Fletcher and Bruce Islands at the mouth of Wayne Bay, Augustus Island in Ward Inlet, and Chase, McLean, Gabriel and Nouyarn Islands towards the Bay's mouth.
Frobisher Bay is named for the English navigator Martin Frobisher, who, during his search for the Northwest Passage in 1576, became the first European to visit it. Until 1861, the Bay was thought by White people to be a strait separating Baffin Island from another island.
[edit] Popular culture
Frozen in Frobisher Bay is a James Gordon song, featured in the TV program Canadian Idol.
[edit] References
[edit] Further reading
- Andrews, John T. Cumberland Sound and Frobisher Bay, Southeastern Baffin Island, N.W.T. Ottawa, Ont: National Research Council of Canada, 1987. ISBN 0660124777
- Eggertsson, Olafur, and Dosia Laeyendecker. 1995. "A Dendrochronological Study of the Origin of Driftwood in Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island, N.W.T., Canada". Arctic and Alpine Research. 27, no. 2: 180.
- Finkler, Harold W. Inuit and the Administration of Criminal Justice in the Northwest Territories The Case of Frobisher Bay. Ottawa: Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, 1976. ISBN 0662002229
- Grainger, E. H. The Food of Ice Fauna and Zooplankton in Frobisher Bay. Ste-Anne de Bellevue, Que: Arctic Biological Station, Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans, 1985.
- Gullason, Lynda. Engendering Interaction Inuit-European Contact in Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island. Ottawa: National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. ISBN 0612501809
- Henshaw, Anne Stevens. Central Inuit Household Economies Zooarchaeological, Environmental, and Historical Evidence from Outer Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island, Canada. BAR international series, 871. Oxford, England: Archaeopress, 2000. ISBN 1841710733
- Mallon, S. T. Inuktitut, Frobisher Bay Version. Yellowknife, N.W.T.: Dept. of Education, 1977.
- Odess, Daniel. Interaction, Adaptation, and Culture Change Lithic Exchange in Frobisher Bay Dorset Society, Baffin Island, Arctic Canada. 1996.
- Roy, Sharat Kumar. The Upper Ordovician Fauna of Frobisher Bay, Baffin Land. 1941.
- Thomson, G. James. A Ring of Urgency An Engineering Memoir : from the Halls of Humberside to the Shores of Frobisher Bay. Scarborough, Ont: Abbeyfield Publishers, 1995. ISBN 0969953607
