Innuitian Region

The Innuitian Region is a physiographic division of the far north of Canada. It is one of the three divisions of the Arctic Lands physiographic region, alongside the Arctic Coastal Plain and the Arctic Lowlands, and most of it is made up of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, which are also counted as part of the Arctic Archipelago. Its relief is organised around three major mountain ranges, the Grantland Mountains, the Princess Margaret Range and the Victoria and Albert Mountains, which belong to the Innuitian Mountains and so to the wider Arctic Cordillera mountain system. Between the ranges lie plateaus, uplands and lowlands, among them the Eureka Upland in the middle and, to the south, the Perry Plateau and the Sverdrup Lowlands, a rolling, scarped lowland of low relief. Ice is a strong presence: on central Axel Heiberg Island and northwestern Ellesmere Island the mountains are nearly buried by ice sheets with only the peaks showing as nunataks, and about one third of Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg Islands is covered with ice.