Canada's northern tip holds only 144 year-round residents
Ellesmere is Canada's northernmost island, third-largest nationally and tenth worldwide, covering about 197,790 square kilometres—nearly Britain's size. In 2021 just 144 people lived in Alert, Eureka, and Grise Fiord, while Cape Columbia marks the country's farthest north.
Part of the Arctic Archipelago's Queen Elizabeth Islands in Nunavut's Qikiqtaaluk Region, Ellesmere is the archipelago's most mountainous mass, draped by the Arctic Cordillera. More than one-fifth lies inside Quttinirpaaq National Park. Length approaches 830 kilometres of ice, fjord, and rock.
Three geological regions shape the island. The Grant Land Highlands, a belt of fold mountains along the north coast, belong to the Franklinian mobile belt of volcanic and intrusive rock. Uplift and faulting before the Pleistocene set the broad outline, rebound after the last glaciation raised the land further, and erosion finished the carving. Weather and military stations at Alert and Eureka keep a small presence where few civilians live.
People reached Ellesmere from the south and west, following its coasts toward Nares Strait. Cold, dry air freeze-dries exposed artifacts and permafrost preserves buried ones, so the archaeological trail is unusually complete. Small bands of the Arctic Small Tool tradition hunted between Axel Heiberg Island and northern Greenland; the Thule arrived around 1000 CE during a warm spell, clustering near the polynyas of Smith Sound, and replaced the Dorset after 1300. More than fifty Norse objects, chain mail among them, turned up at Thule sites on the Bache Peninsula. The Little Ice Age between 1400 and 1600 drove the Thule out.
William Baffin's 1616 expedition made the first recorded European sighting of the island. After an ice jam in Baffin Bay broke in 1818, John Ross reached Cape York, where only about 140 Inughuit reportedly lived, and the hunt for Franklin's lost expedition later sent more than forty voyages north over two decades. As hunting eased again with the end of the Little Ice Age, Indigenous families began returning to Ellesmere.
Source: Ellesmere Island
