Ukkusiksalik National Park - Landscape

Landscape

At Hudson Bay’s northwest corner, some 200 km (120 mi) northeast of Chesterfield Inlet, near the Capes Fullerton and Kendall, is the entrance of Roes Welcome Sound, which extends northwards between the Barrenlands of the Kivalliq Region (meaning: border of the land) and Southampton Island to Repulse Bay, where there is a settlement of that name, situated at the Arctic circle. Wager Bay is an inlet of Roes Welcome Sound, pretty much in its geographical center, near Cape Dobbs.

Wager Bay is the core of the national park. Its entrance is a rather narrow bottleneck, it is more than 30 km (19 mi) long and approximately 4 km (2.5 mi) wide at its narrowest spot. The tides rise and fall up to 8 metres (26 ft) and currents are extraordinary and cause large accumulations of ice masses during most of the year, often preventing the passage of watercraft. During early summer the rising flood water washes large quantities of drifting ice and icebergs into the bay. These accumulate during ebb tide, close the bottleneck like a cork and may stay for hours or even days.

In some places, Wager Bay is more than 250 m (820 ft) deep. The fjord is up to 35 km (22 mi) wide and almost 200 km (120 mi) long, extending northwest into Kivalliq-Barrenlands. It reaches latitude 66°, therefore some 40 km (25 mi) from the Arctic Circle.

Even at its western end, tides are impressive, between Wager Bay and the 2 km (1.2 mi) wide Ford Lake (Tusjujak in Inuktitut), so-called Reversing Falls occur. In Canada, only three of those phenomena are known, Reversing Falls in New Brunswick and Barrier Inlet, Hudson Strait, Nunavut are the others. The strongest ones are in Norway, 30 km (19 mi) east of Bodø, Nordland. They are called Saltstraumen and considered world’s strongest tidal currents.

The soil of the area is characteristic of the Canadian Shield.