Mass balance of glaciers in the Queen Elizabeth Islands, Nunavut, Canada

Mass-balance measurements began in the Canadian High Arctic in 1959. This paper considers the >40 years of measurements made since then, principally on two stagnant ice caps (on Meighen and Melville Islands), parts of two ice caps (the northeast section of Agassiz Ice Cap on northern Ellesmere Island and the northwest part of Devon Ice Cap on Devon Island) and two glaciers (White and Baby Glaciers, Axel Heiberg Island). The results show continuing negative balances. All the glaciers and ice caps except Meighen Ice Cap show weak but significant trends with time towards increasingly negative balances. Meighen Ice Cap may owe its lack of a trend to a cooling feedback from the increasingly open Arctic Ocean nearby (Johannessen and others, 1995). Feedback from this ocean has been shown to be the main cause of this ice cap’s growth and persistence at such a low elevation of