Croker Bay: Our Highest Latitude

At some point during Ken’s lecture, there was enough of a lull in the storm to allow the captain to turn the ship’s bow and head up into a sheltered fjord along Devon Island’s southern coast.

The deeper the ship went into Croker Bay, an arm of Lancaster Sound, the calmer conditions became. Still not good enough for zodiac operations, however. Nonetheless, we enjoyed seeing the two tidewater glaciers that drain the Devon Ice Cap … deemed as one of the largest in the Canadian High Arctic.

Here’s a bit of trivia … so big is this ice cap, in fact, that should it melt in its entirety, it would raise the world’s sea level by .4 inches. That number might seem small, but consider that the meltwater will be spread across approximately the 140 MILLION square miles of ocean that cover the globe. Today we caught just a miniscule glimpse of the cap where it terminates in Croker Bay.

We spent a bit of time in front of the southern glacier … the one further north barely visible through the mist. And then we turned south again to slowly traverse the fjord back towards Lancaster Sound.

Since we will be turning east when we reach Croker Bay and then heading south through Baffin Bay in the remaining days of our expedition, I believe this little jaunt put us at our highest latitude. I’ll have to wait for the official number, but some of my photos of the glacier put us at around 74°48'46.7" N.Read more