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Alert, Nunavut
A Canadian military and weather station on Ellesmere Island, the northernmost permanently inhabited place on Earth
No one is born in Alert, and almost no one stays long, yet the station has been staffed without a break for more than seven decades, making it the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world. It sits at the northeastern tip of Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, about 817 kilometers from the North Pole and far closer to the Pole than to any Canadian city. From mid-October to the end of February the sun never rises. Most of its people are Canadian Armed Forces personnel and contractors on tours of a few months, joined by Environment and Climate Change Canada staff who run a weather station and one of the world's key observatories for greenhouse gases.
Alert lies at about 82°30′N on the shore of the Lincoln Sea, where Ellesmere Island faces the Arctic Ocean, roughly 12 kilometers west of Cape Sheridan and across the water from northern Greenland. The landscape is polar desert: low hills of gravel and frost-shattered rock, snow for most of the year, little precipitation, and almost no vegetation beyond mosses, lichens and small flowers in the brief summer. The yearly mean temperature is about −17.7 °C, and the record low is −50 °C. Between roughly 55 and 110 people are present at any time, more in summer, living in heated buildings beside a gravel airstrip that is the only practical way in. Fuel and supplies come by military aircraft, above all in an annual airlift called Operation Boxtop.
The site takes its name from HMS Alert, a ship of the 1875–76 British Arctic Expedition under George Nares, which wintered nearby. Canada and the United States set up a joint weather station there in 1950, one of a chain of High Arctic posts, and a military radio station followed in 1958, renamed Canadian Forces Station Alert in 1968 and used for signals intelligence. In 1991 a supply aircraft crashed near the airfield, killing four of the 18 people aboard. The Global Atmosphere Watch observatory at Alert, named for the scientist Neil Trivett, has tracked carbon dioxide and other gases for decades, one of the longest clean-air records in the Arctic. The station also anchors Canada's presence in the far north.