The world's largest desert island is in.. Canada?

In this week's Maphead, Ken Jennings explores an uninhabited island near the North Pole.

The world's tallest unclimbed mountain, as we've seen, is Gangkhar Puensum, on the border between China and Bhutan. But if you're more into sailing than mountain climbing, where is the nautical equivalent of Gangkhar Puensum? In other words, what's the world's largest island without human inhabitants? If you're imagining some tiny, obscure atoll in the South Pacific, you're in for a surprise. The world's largest uninhabited island is pretty hard to miss -- it's about the size of West Virginia.

The men who named Devon Island found it to the north of the North Pole.

In 1819, British admiral Sir William Parry ventured three-quarters of the way across the icy waters of the Canadian Arctic, coming closer to discovering the fabled "Northwest Passage" than any other explorer of his era. Along the way, Parry mapped the southern coast of a vast island he named Devon, after the English county. It was off Devon Island that his crew became the first Europeans ever to hear the high-pitched song of the beluga whales, the "canaries of the sea." Parry's crew was also near Devon when they noted with interest that their compasses were pointing south toward the North Pole! (At the time, the magnetic north pole was over a thousand miles south of the geographic pole.)

No human being alive today has ever called Devon Island home.

Devon Island sits between two of the world's largest islands, Baffin and Ellesmere. Both those islands have small permanent populations today (Ellesmere, the size of Nebraska, has about 150 residents, most in the tiny Inuit village of Grise Fjord.) But Devon has a year-round population of exactly zero. There's evidence of Paleo-Eskimo settlement there by the Dorset and Thule cultures going back thousands of years, but in recorded history, Devon has only been inhabited twice: once in the 1930s by resettled Inuit hunters (who left because it was too cold even for them!) and once in the 1940s by Mounties (who left when their harbor got iced in).

Devon is literally a desert island.

As a child, when I read adventure novels about marooned sailors, I was surprised that they were always landing on "desert islands." How could the Swiss Family Robinson live in a giant tree if their island was a desert? I know now, of course, that "desert islands" get their name from the fact that they're deserted, not dry. But Devon Island is the rare desert island that's actually a desert. It's often too cold to snow much in the Canadian Arctic, and Devon Island's high latitude and high elevation combine to make it a true desert -- even when it's cold and icy.

Report a Typo