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EMERGING
ARCTIC COASTAL LANDSCAPE AND ECOLOGICAL NICHES OF PRINCE CHARLES ISLAND,
I.P. MARTINI1
and R.I.G. MORRISON2
1Department of Land Resource Science, University of Guelph,
Guelph, Ontario, Canada ˇˇ Prince Charles Island is large (122x95 Km), semicircular in shape. It is underlain by horizontally bedded Paleozoic carbonates, covered by a discontinuous, locally fluted, thin tills, scattered isolated erratics, sand and gravel deposited in beach ridges during recent, rapid (75 cm/century) emergence, and thin mud and fine sands on flat emerged embayments. The climate is arctic and the island is surrounded by a shallow (less than 25fathoms) cold sea covered by ice for most of the year. The island is exposed to the open sea waves on its southern and western quadrants, and is protected from sea swells on the north and northeast by nearby islands and the coast of Baffin Island. These factors have been important in molding the emerging coastal morphology and the various ecological niches which are sparsely utilized by animals such as shorebirds, foxes, and for part of the year, polar bears. Breeding migratory birds (Red Phalarope, White-rumped Sandpiper, Sabine's Gull, Brant, Canada and Snow geese, Eiders and few other species) preferentially use both the marshy eastern part of the island areas, dotted by round, large, thaw lakes, and the area between beach ridges of the western and northern areas occupied by elongated lakes. The higher (up to 76 m asl), central part of the island has bared striated bedrock and thin, gravelly and sandy beach ridges formed during early stages of emergence of the island. Colonization by plants (ˇ±Dryas", sedges, saxifrages) is slow in that area and few animals use it, except for polar bears whose dens dug into snowbanks to the ground, leave surficially pitted slopes. |
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