Fritz Muüller's legacy on Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut, Canada

Abstract

Fritz Müller (1926-80) was the leader of the Jacobsen-McGill Arctic Research Expeditions to Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut. Canada. He was a faculty member at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, from 1959 to 1970. Thereafter, he was Chair of Geography at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich, Switzerland. He conducted research on Axel Heiberg Island, mainly in the vicinity of Expedition Fiord, from 1959 until his death in 1980. This paper is a personal account of Müller's work by one of his students, with a commentary on his contributions to Arctic science. The personal account focuses on the early years of the expeditions. The commentary includes discussion of glacier mass-balance records and lake-ice break-up from 1959 to the present, glacier-terminus records from 1948 to the present and other research focused on the region.