Arctic Archipelago

Around 2500 BCE, the Paleo-Eskimos arrived to the archipelago from the Canadian mainland, the first humans to do so. Between 1000 and 1500 CE, they were replaced by the Thule people, who are the ancestors of today's Inuit.

British claims on the islands, the British Arctic Territories, were based on the explorations in the 1570s by Martin Frobisher. Canadian sovereignty was originally (1870–80) only over island portions that drained into Foxe Basin, Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait. Canadian sovereignty over the islands was established by 1880 when Britain transferred them to Canada. The District of Franklin—established in 1895—comprised almost all of the archipelago. The district was dissolved upon the creation of Nunavut in 1999. Canada claims all the waterways of the Northwest Passage as Canadian Internal Waters; however, most maritime countries view these as international waters. Disagreement over the passages' status has raised Canadian concerns about environmental enforcement, national security, and general sovereignty. East of Ellesmere Island, in the Nares Strait, lies Hans Island, ownership of which is now shared between Canada and Denmark, after a decades-long dispute.

The archipelago extends some 2,400 km (1,500 mi) longitudinally and 1,900 km (1,200 mi) from the mainland to Cape Columbia, the northernmost point on Ellesmere Island. It is bounded on the west by the Beaufort Sea; on the northwest by the Arctic Ocean; on the east by Greenland, Baffin Bay and Davis Strait; and on the south by Hudson Bay and the Canadian mainland. The various islands are separated from each other and the continental mainland by a series of waterways collectively known as the Northwest Passage. Two large peninsulas, Boothia and Melville, extend northward from the mainland. The northernmost cluster of islands, including Ellesmere Island, is known as the Queen Elizabeth Islands and was formerly the Parry Islands.

The archipelago consists of 36,563 islands, of which 94 are classified as major islands, being larger than 130 km² (50 sq mi), and cover a total area of 1,400,000 km² (540,000 sq mi).

As of 2026, there are 20 islands in the Canadian Arctic over 5,000 km² (1,900 sq mi). They are listed in order of descending area below. There are a further 19 islands greater than 1,000 km (620 mi) but under 5,000 km² (1,900 sq mi) in Arctic Canada. As of 2021 the total population of all islands in the Arctic was 23,073.

After Greenland, the archipelago is the world's largest high-Arctic land area. The climate of the islands is Arctic, and the terrain consists of tundra except in mountainous regions. Most of the islands are uninhabited; human settlement is extremely thin and scattered, being mainly coastal Inuit settlements on the southern islands.

Islands not on map

Of the more than 36,000 islands, only 11 are populated. Baffin Island, the largest, also has the largest population of 13,309. The population accounts for 67.37 per cent of the 19,355 people in the Qikiqtaaluk Region, 56.51 per cent of the population of the Arctic Archipelago, and 35.38 per cent of the population of Nunavut.