'kidney shaped';[2] Inuktitut syllabics: ᑕᕐᑐᐸᓗᒃ; Danish: Hans Ø, pronounced [hanˀs øˀ]; French: île Hans, pronounced [il ɑ̃(n)s]) is an island in the centre of the Kennedy Channel of Nares Strait in the high Arctic region, split between the Canadian territory of Nunavut and the Danish autonomous territory of Greenland.

The strait at this point is 35 km (22 mi) wide, placing the island within the territorial waters of both Canada and Denmark (Greenland).

In accordance with the Greenland home rule treaty, Denmark handles certain foreign affairs, such as border disputes, on behalf of the entire Danish Realm.

As determined by field investigations and the interpretation of satellite image maps and monochrome stereoscopic air photographs, the exposed portion of Hans Island consists of 195 m (640 ft) of Silurian limestone.

These sedimentary strata underlying Washington Land, Hans Island and most of subsurface Kennedy Channel are undeformed with a northwesterly dip of 1 to 3 degrees.

However, these strata lack the geological structures and facies changes capable of trapping these hydrocarbons and forming commercial-size petroleum reservoirs.

These sediments consist of a mixture of gravel, mud and boulders that form a discontinuous till veneer on its limestone surface over much of the island with the exception of its coastal cliffs and part of the intertidal zone.

The gravel consists of angular to subrounded (kidney-shaped) limestone clasts and large erratics of red granites and granitoid and garnet gneisses.

[citation needed] Charles Henry Davis writes, The ship was tied to a large floe, and drifted slowly down the channel with the pack; about noon, she was quite near Hans Island and west of it.

The latitude by observation was 80°48′ N; longitude 68°38′ W. The ship continued to drift, and at 7 p.m. was midway between Hans and Franklin Island, which are ten miles.

The ship's doctor and leader of the scientific part of the expedition, Emil Bessels, mentioned the island in his own book, Die amerikanische Nordpol-Expedition (1879).

Thus the year 1853 is now often cited as the date of the discovery and naming of the island, including in a letter by the Danish Ambassador to Canada in the Ottawa Citizen on 28 July 2005.

There was no trouble in doing so, for they flew in a bee-line to a group of rocky islets, ... A rugged little ledge, which I named Eider Island, was so thickly colonized that we could hardly walk without treading on a nest ...

Canadian-based Dome Petroleum made surveys on and around Hans Island from 1980 to 1983, to investigate the movement of ice masses.

The maritime boundary immediately north and south of Hans Island was established in the continental shelf treaty ratified by Denmark and Canada and then submitted to the United Nations on 17 December 1973, in force since 13 March 1974.

The Government of the Kingdom of Denmark and the Government of Canada, having decided to establish in the area between Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Islands a dividing line beyond which neither Party exercising its rights under the Convention on the Continental Shelf of April/29/1958 will extend its sovereign rights for the purpose of exploration and exploitation of the natural resources of the continental shelf…The treaty lists 127 points (latitude and longitude) from Davis Strait to the end of Robeson Channel, where the Nares Strait runs into the Lincoln Sea, to draw geodesic lines between, to form the border.

[14][15] Simultaneously, the Danish and Canadian governments were in the process of signing a cooperation agreement in relation to the marine environment in the Nares Strait.

One of the items also discussed was the possibility of establishing a reciprocal arrangement for processing applications to conduct research on and around Hans Island.

In this matter, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Russia, and Norway share an interest in establishing parts of the Arctic seas as "national waters".

[citation needed] The 2004 Canadian budget was introduced on 23 March 2004, by the government of Canada, two days before the issue gained widespread attention.

The issue of Hans Island was raised in the Canadian Parliament by opposition foreign affairs critic Stockwell Day to highlight the government's failure to provide more funding for the military.

A news article by Adrian Humphreys on 30 March 2004, also in the National Post, entitled "Danes summon envoy over Arctic fight—the solution of the dispute is not going to be military", drew even more attention to the issue.

The article claimed Brian Herman, Canada's only diplomat in Denmark (ambassador Alfonso Gagliano having been recently recalled as a result of an unrelated Canadian scandal), was called before the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to comment about his country's intentions in the dispute, which had, according to the article, recently been inflamed by Danish sailors occupying Hans Island.

[citation needed] A new development came to light after Canadian Defence Minister Bill Graham visited the island on 20 July 2005.

Peter Taksøe-Jensen, the head of the international law department at Denmark's foreign ministry, said the following in an interview with Reuters on 25 July in response to the event: We consider Hans Island to be part of Danish territory and will therefore hand over a complaint about the Canadian minister's unannounced visit.

[30] On 11 June 2022, the Danish, Greenlandic, Canadian, and Nunavut governments agreed to split Hans Island in half after 17 years of negotiations.