I haven't seen much about this specific topic, so I thought I would open it up for discussion. With the arctic areas of the world expected to warm the most drastically over the next 100 years, it would make sense for the arctic archipelago in canada to serve as a prime location for city-building in just a few hundred years.
The facts:
The region is expected to warm by around 12 Celsius by the 2080s: https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/prairie-climate-centre-canada-weather-future
This specific region of North America has been unexplored in terms of potential resources, which means an untapped source of energy/materials: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Petroleum_regions_-_North_America_map-fr.svg
the future climate of the area may support forestry, here is a current map of the boreal forest region, which will presumably shift northward over time: https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/post-launch-images/2015/03/boreal_map.jpg
Not to mention that so many islands will make transportation of materials easier via boats rather than having to deal with the construction of so many freight train lines.
Will this area be a future population center for humanity? Will each island be its own country? Will the entire archipelago be one government? This would all be a few hundred years into the future, if the rate of climate change remains on course. Perhaps a future humanity will be separated by hemisphere, with the most developed countries hugging the two poles, with nations becoming less developed as they near the equator, much like how the Old World was cut off from the New World when the Bering Strait disappeared thousands of years ago.
From what I have been able to work out, I think this hypothetical range very likely, at least partly in some places if not the full assemblage.
Unlike Britain in Europe, the Arctic Archipelago was not formed by floods and rising sea levels at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition but were, so to speak, already islands beneath the ice. At this time, with the exceptions of Banks Island and Victoria Island, the islands of the archipelago were at all times separated from mainland North America and each other by ice sheets and ocean channels.
This is visually demonstrated in this video which maps the melting of the North American ice sheets during the LGM and early Holocene. (Sped-up version starts at 05:30) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LydQXydQKrc
This might suggest that as the glaciers retreated in the Holocene, hypothetical megafaunal migrations across the Arctic Archipelago to Greenland would have been cut short by ocean channels with no consistent land passage across. Yet here is the modern range of the muskox (Red = naturally established range, blue = reintroductions.)
https://preview.redd.it/nxjp1wy4o0281.png?width=450&format=png&auto=webp&s=57fb0a81515b9c1dd1fbe66b2f0c8670a2de07ef
Evidence from a paper I read about caribou migration suggested that this range was fully established by the mid-Holocene. Caribou and wolves also live across this range, as well as on Baffin Island. Sea ice is no barrier to caribou which can migrate across it at speed for long distances. Muskoxen cannot travel great distances like caribou, but they can and do cross sea ice. The islands of the Arctic Archipelago are pretty densely clustered, and while some sea channels are much wider than others, one island always seems to come pretty close to another at certain points along their perimeters. That is to say, there are always points in the archipelago where a short and manageable crossing over sea ice is possible.
The Parry Channel is the most significant barrier, but even this does not present an unreasonable barrier, with its narrowest point being 45km (28 miles) wide, which a hardy beast could manage in a day. If Muskoxen managed the Parry Channel then I'm damned sure that bison herds and woolly mammoths would have managed it too. As for predators, they might have made annual trips across the sea ice while stalking the migrating herbivore herds.
If all this is the case, then the hypothetical modern range of th
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