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The statement that "The Queen Elizabeth Islands contain approximately 14% of the global glacier and ice cap area" (in the lede, and repeated later) made me jump at first sight, and actually my first-off guess was that somebody had confused percent and promille (1/1000) which has a similar-looking sign. After checking the source and thinking it over a bit, I got it: the figure is most likely right excluding the steady icesheets of Greenland and Antarctica which make up the overwhelming majority of ice on earth, both in area and (even more) in volume. The total "glacier and ice cap area" referred to likely includes the moving glacier streams on the outskirts of those ice sheets, such as the Beardmore Glacier and the Petermann Glacier. However, that's technical terminology - the ordinary layman and WP reader has absolutely no clear idea of the difference between a glacier in e.g. Antarctica and the main body of the icesheet, and they'll read it just the way I did: the QE Islands hold one seventh of the area of glaciated land in the world, which is obviosuly false and would be more true of Greenland.
The solution is simple, the statement needs a qualifier along the lines of "(this does not include the main bodies of the permament ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica)" 83.254.154.164 (talk) 11:05, 4 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
