Baffin Bay in the context of "Devon Island"

The Labrador Sea (French: mer du Labrador; Danish: Labradorhavet) is an arm of the North Atlantic Ocean between the Labrador Peninsula and Greenland. The sea is flanked by continental shelves to the southwest, northwest, and northeast. It connects to the north with Baffin Bay through the Davis Strait. It is a marginal sea of the Atlantic.

The sea formed upon separation of the North American Plate and Greenland Plate that started about 60 million years ago and stopped about 40 million years ago. It contains one of the world's largest turbidity current channel systems, the Northwest Atlantic Mid-Ocean Channel (NAMOC), that runs for thousands of kilometres along the sea bottom toward the Atlantic Ocean.

The Nares Strait (Danish: Nares Strædet; French: Détroit de Nares) is a waterway between Ellesmere Island and Greenland that connects the northern part of Baffin Bay in the Atlantic Ocean with the Lincoln Sea in the Arctic Ocean. From south to north, the strait includes Smith Sound, Kane Basin, Kennedy Channel, Hall Basin and Robeson Channel. Nares Strait has a nearly permanent current from the north, powered by the Beaufort Gyre, making it harder to traverse for ships coming from the south.

In 1964, its name was agreed by the Danish (Stednavneudvalget, now Stednavnenævnet) and Canadian governments. The name derives from the British naval officer George Strong Nares.

The Davis Strait (Danish: Davisstrædet) is a southern arm of the Arctic Ocean that lies north of the Labrador Sea. It lies between mid-western Greenland and Baffin Island in Nunavut, Canada. To the north is Baffin Bay. The strait was named for the English explorer John Davis (1550–1605), who explored the area while seeking a Northwest Passage. By the 1650s it was used for whale hunting.

The Greenland plate is a tectonic microplate bounded to the west by Nares Strait, a probable transform fault; on the southwest by the Ungava transform underlying Davis Strait; on the southeast by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge; and the northeast by the Gakkel Ridge, with its northwest border still being explored. The Greenland craton is made up of some of the oldest rocks on Earth. The Isua greenstone belt in southwestern Greenland contains the oldest known rocks on Earth dated at 3.7–3.8 billion years old.

The Precambrian basement of Greenland formed an integral part of the Laurentian Shield that is at the core of the North American continent. Greenland was formed in two rifting stages from the main body of North America. The first, during the Cretaceous period, formed Baffin Bay. Baffin Bay is the northwestern extension and terminus of the North Atlantic-Labrador Sea rift system that started forming 140 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous epoch. The Labrador Sea started opening 69 million years ago during the Maastrichtian age but seafloor spreading appears to have ceased by the Oligocene epoch, 30–35 million years ago. Correlations between tectonic units in Canada and Greenland have been proposed; however, the pre-spreading fit of Greenland to Canada is still not accurately known. A sinistral transtensive rifting which was proposed with NNE-SSW trending mobile transfer zones fits Greenland to Canada directly in a southward direction.

Disko Island (Greenlandic: Qeqertarsuaq, Danish: Diskoøen) is a large island in Baffin Bay, off the west coast of Greenland. It has an area of 8,578 km (3,312 sq mi), making it the second largest island of Greenland (behind the main island), and one of the 100 largest islands in the world. It is part of the Qeqertalik municipality, although it lies off the coast of southern Avannaata municipality, with mainland Qeqertalik a little to the south.

The Arctic Cordillera is a terrestrial ecozone in northern Canada characterized by a vast, deeply dissected chain of mountain ranges extending along the northeastern flank of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago from Ellesmere Island to the northeasternmost part of the Labrador Peninsula in northern Labrador and northern Quebec, Canada. It spans most of the eastern coast of Nunavut with high glaciated peaks rising through ice fields and some of Canada's largest ice caps, including the Penny Ice Cap on Baffin Island. It is bounded to the east by Baffin Bay, Davis Strait and the Labrador Sea while its northern portion is bounded by the Arctic Ocean.

The geographic range is composed along the provinces of Labrador: including Eastern Baffin, Devon Island, Ellesmere, Bylot Island, the Torngat Mountains, and some parts of the Northeastern fringe. The landscape is dominated by massive polar icefields, alpine glaciers, inland fjords, and large bordering bodies of water, distinctive of many similar arctic regions in the world. Although the terrain is infamous for its unforgiving conditions, humans maintained an established population of 1000 people – 80% of which were Inuit. In addition, the landscape is 75% covered by ice or exposed bedrock, with a continuous permafrost that persists throughout the year, making plant and animal life somewhat scarce. The temperature of the Arctic Cordillera ranges from 6 °C in summer, down to −16 °C in winter. Vegetation is largely absent in this area due to permanent ice and snow.