Queen Elizabeth Islands the four ice caps that the federal government's NRCan's Climate Change Geoscience Program Earth Sciences Sector (ESS), monitors onsite in the Canadian High Arctic, three are in the Queen Elizabeth Islands: Devon, Meighen and Melville. In a memo to Earth Sciences Sector (ESS) in Canada's High Arctic indicates that shrinking of ice caps started in the late 1980s, and has accelerated rapidly since 2005," says an October 2013 memo to NRCan's deputy minister, who reports to federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver. The increased melt rate was confirmed by University of California, Irvine in 2017. Computer analysis of a glacier
Queen Elizabeth Islands of advanced marine and land seismic technologies in Alaska, Northern Europe and Siberia could be modified for use in the Queen Elizabeth Islands. First sighted by Europeans in 1616, the Queen Elizabeth Islands were not fully explored and charted until the British Northwest Passage expeditions and later Norwegian exploration of the 19th century. These islands were known as the Parry Archipelago for over 130 years. They were first named after British Arctic explorer Sir William Parry, who sailed there in 1820, aboard the "Hecla". Since the renaming of the archipelago in 1953, the term Parry Islands continued to be used