Baffin Bay (Inuktitut: Saknirutiak Imanga, French: Baie de Baffin), located between Baffin Island and the southwest coast of Greenland, is a marginal sea of the North Atlantic Ocean. It is connected to the Atlantic via Davis Strait and the Labrador Sea. A narrower Nares Strait connects Baffin Bay with the Arctic Ocean.
The bay area was inhabited from around 500 BC by the Dorset and then Thule and Inuit people. It was reached by Europeans in 1585 and described in detail in 1616 by William Baffin, after whom the bay and the island are named. The bay is not navigable most of the year because of the ice cover and high density of floating ice and icebergs in the open areas. However, a polynya of about 80,000 km2 (31,000 sq mi), known as the North Water, opens in summer on the north near Smith Sound. Most of the aquatic life of the bay is concentrated near that region.
Read more about Baffin Bay: History, Extent, Geography and Geology, Climate, Hydrology and Hydrochemistry, North Water, Wildlife
Famous quotes containing the words baffin and/or bay:
“Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.”
—Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990)
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)