Ward Hunt Island


Ward Hunt Island is a small, uninhabited island in the Arctic Ocean, off the north coast of Ellesmere Island. Its northern cape is one of the northernmost elements of land in Canada. Only a 17 km stretch of northern coast of Ellesmere Island around Cape Columbia is more northerly. The island is long, east to west, and wide. The first known sighting was in 1876 by Pelham Aldrich, a lieutenant with the George Nares expedition, and named for George Ward Hunt, First Lord of the Admiralty at the time.

History

Ward Hunt Island was briefly used as a weather station during the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58, and since then it has been used as the starting point for a number of attempts to reach the North Pole, beginning with Ralph Plaisted in 1968. There is an airstrip, and a building on the north shore of the island.
On July 29, 2008, a giant chunk of ice broke away from the shelf on Ward Hunt Island. The new ice island had an area of. It was the largest fracture of its kind since the nearby Ayles Ice Shelf—which measured —broke away in 2005.
In 1959, an American geologist, Paul T. Walker, put a note in a bottle and built a cairn over it near a glacier north of Grise Fiord, Nunavut. The note stated that the cairn was in front of a glacier, and left instructions to measure the distance again when the note was found. Researchers from Laval University found it in the summer of 2013. The distance by then was. At the time, few scientists were expecting glaciers to retreat.
In July 2016, a team of scientists with the Canadian Armed Forces while conducting a site visit of Eureka, Tanquary Fiord, and Ward Hunt Island found a cairn erected in 1975 by then Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, who had been accompanied by two of his sons, Justin Trudeau and Alexandre Trudeau. A picture of the plaque was presented to current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan on behalf of the Canadian Armed Forces.