Largest Uninhabited Island on Earth 03 May 2012 by kuschk

 https://web.archive.org/web/20160304022605/https://basementgeographer.com/devon-island-the-largest-uninhabited-island-on-earth/

Devon Island: The Largest Uninhabited Island on Earth

03 May 2012 by kuschk

Canada’s Devon Island is the 27th largest island on Earth.  At 55 247 km2 (21 331 sq mi), it’s about the same size as Croatia, yet not a single person lives on the island year-round.  Thanks to its forbidding climate and terrain, Devon is the largest uninhabited island on the planet.

Devon Island is largely comprised of a plateau rising to 300-500 m (980-1 640 ft) above sea level composed of Precambrian gneiss and Paleozoic siltstones surrounded by steep cliffs and indented by large fjords, though the large Grinnell Peninsula on the northwest coast is rather hilly.  The eastern third of Devon is covered in a large ice cap 14 010 km2 (5 410 sq mi) in size and 500-700 m (1 640-2 300 ft) thick, and the western two-thirds is almost completely barren, full of frost-shattered rock.  The scant summer (and by summer, we mean ‘days when the ground is snow-free’) here lasts around 40 to 55 days, and temperatures rarely get hotter than 10 °C (50 °F).  The annual mean temperature? -16°C  (3°F).  Other than a few dozen muskoxen and lemmings concentrated in the Truelove Lowland on the north coast, large animals of any kind are hard to find on Devon.

Located in Canada’s Queen Elizabeth Islands (the northern half of its Arctic Archipelago), Devon Island was first sighted by Europeans in 1616 when the English explorers Robert Bylot and William Baffin sailed into the Arctic for a then-record furthest north of 77° 45’N latitude.  The island, however, would not receive a name or appear on maps until William Edward Parry’s 1820s search for the Northwest Passage in the region.  Parry named the new land North Devon after Devon, England (at this point, it still hadn’t been determined whether or not it was a distinct island or part of some other island).

The 1855 Colton Map of Northern America shows North Devon with an undefined northwest coast; Grinnell Land would eventually be uncovered as the Grinnell Peninsula.  ‘North Devon’ would morph into ‘Devon Island’ by the end of the century.

While Devon is uninhabited today, there have been settlements on the island in the past.  Palaeo-Inuitartefacts have been found on the island dating back 4 500 years, and modern-day Inuit continued to hunt in the region.  In the 20th century, a settlement was founded at Dundas Harbour on Devon’s south coast; an early attempt to establish a Canadian government presence in the region and to curb whaling activity.  The settlement was based around a Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment that operated from 1924 to 1933 and again from 1945 to 1951.  In the 1933-1945 period, 52 Inuit from Cape Dorset on Baffin Island were resettled here (as with the later postwar High Arctic resettlements to the north , this was done under the pretense of helping the Inuit find food, but all of the Inuit eventually returned to Cape Dorset).  The short-lived community at Dundas Harbour did give rise to what is considered by some to be the northernmost cemetery on the continent (but not the world, as is often stated; this cemetery in Svalbard, for example, is four degrees to the north).  Since 1951, Dundas Harbour has been completely abandoned, thus allowing Devon Island its title as the world’s largest uninhabited island.  The old RCMP buildings still lie on the shore, however, as do the old grave markers.