Cold climate exerts a clear influence on the processes of marine transgression in mid-and high-latitude coastal-plain settings, but its signature in the depositional record is much clearer at high latitude. Both cases selected for this study are influenced by the legacy of past glaciation and the pervasive effects of ongoing Holocene marine transgression. Both are affected by sea ice. The high-latitude site lies within the zone of continuous permafrost and the abundance of excess ground ice along the Beaufort coast is the dominant factor distinguishing it from the mid-latitude Gulf of St Lawrence (GSL) setting and standard models of transgressive coasts elsewhere. In the southern GSL, the transgressive unconformity (TU) is at the seabed (or buried by a very thin veneer) across the inner shelf; shoreface sand moves landward, keeping pace with the transgressive front through deposition in barriers, dunes and estuaries. The pace of transgression in the Beaufort Sea is influenced by a number of distinctive periglacial erosion processes, including thermal abrasion and thaw subsidence. Marine transgression across this landscape creates intricate breached-lake estuaries and low sandy barrier beaches with limited dunes, leaving distinctive facies suites and geometry, while seaward sediment transport buries the TU on the inner shelf. The broad diversity of the Earth's coastline is a clear legacy of geophysical and biological processes acting on the antecedent topography and geology of coastal regions. From the world's great coral reefs to its largest deltas and barrier island complexes, from glacial fjord troughs to shallow estuarine systems, the imprint of marine and atmospheric forcing on coastal landscapes has a wide variety of outcomes. Climate and vegetation (itself largely a function of climate) strongly influence the intensity and effectiveness of the driving forces (Kelletat et al. 2013). The history of shoreline changes can be read in the patterns of surviving coastal landforms (above and below water) and in the underlying facies and stratigraphy of the resulting sedimentary products, which are controlled to a large extent by temporal variability in sea level. Common patterns can be seen across wide ranges of latitude, but some very distinctive coastal forms, such as coral and algal reefs, mangrove forests, temperate salt marshes and ice-rich permafrost coasts, attest to ecological opportunities and geophysical limits imposed by climate. This paper examines coastal outcomes of marine transgression in cold-climate settings and distinctive characteristics attributable in whole or in part to climate.