Introduction
The Arctic, long considered a “… region of darkness and mists, where sea, land and sky were merged into a congealed mass” (Nansen 1911, p. 1), has subsequently been defined according to its astronomic, biotic, climatic, cryologic, geomorphic, and hydrologic characteristics (Walker 1983). From the standpoint of coastal morphology, it is the juncture of whichever category is used with the coastline that is important. The determinant that provides the greatest extent to the coastline is sea ice. In the Northern Hemisphere using sea ice as the limiting boundary results in the inclusion of the coastlines of Hudson Bay, Labrador, and Newfoundland, the Sea of Okhotsk and most of the Baltic and Bering Seas (See Ice-Bordered Coasts). By many other criteria, most of these coastlines do not qualify as Arctic.
In this entry, the discussion centers on those coasts that border the Arctic Ocean and surround Greenland and the islands of the Canadian Archipelago. When the lengths of these...
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Walker, H.J. (2019). Arctic, Coastal Geomorphology. In: Finkl, C.W., Makowski, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Coastal Science. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93806-6_13
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