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Devon Island (, )Jerry Kobalenko. The Horizontal Everest: Extreme Journeys on Ellesmere Island. BPS Books, 2010 is an island in Canada and the largest desert island (no permanent residents) in the world. It is located in Baffin Bay, Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada. It is one of the largest members of the Arctic Archipelago, the second-largest of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, Canada's sixth-largest island, and the 27th-largest island in the world. It has an area of (slightly smaller than Croatia). The bedrock is Precambrian gneiss and Paleozoic and . The highest point is the Devon Ice Cap at which is part of the Arctic Cordillera. Devon Island contains several small , such as the Treuter Mountains, Haddington Range, and Cunningham Mountains, as well as the Haughton impact crater. The notable similarity of its surface to that of Mars has attracted interest from scientists.
An outpost was established at Dundas Harbour in 1924, and it was leased to the Hudson's Bay Company nine years later. The collapse of fur prices led to the dispersal of 52 Baffin Island Inuit families to Dundas Harbour in 1934. Their time there was considered a disaster due to wind conditions and the much colder climate, and the Inuit chose to leave in 1936. Dundas Harbour was populated again in the late 1940s, but it was closed again in 1951. Only the ruins of a few buildings remain today.
Because of its relatively high elevation and its extreme northern latitude, Devon Island supports only a meagre population of muskox and small birds and mammals; the island does support hypolith communities. Animal life is concentrated in the Truelove Lowland area of the island, which has a favourable microclimate and supports relatively lush Arctic vegetation. Temperatures during the brief (40 to 55 days) growing season seldom exceed , and in winter can plunge to as low as . With a polar desert ecology, Devon Island receives very little precipitation.
Cape Liddon is an Important Bird Area (IBA) notable for its black guillemot and northern fulmar populations. Cape Vera, another IBA site, is also noted for its northern fulmar population.
Devon Island is also notable for the presence of the Haughton impact crater, created some 39 million years ago when a meteorite about in diameter crashed into what were then forests. The impact left a crater about in diameter, which was a lake for several million years. A number of fossils have been recovered from Haughton crater lake deposits, including the Pinniped ancestor Puijila and the rhinoceros Epiaceratherium.
The Haughton crater is now considered one of the world's best Mars analog sites. It is the summer home to NASA's complementary scientific program, the Haughton–Mars Project. The island's freezing temperatures, isolation, and remoteness offer scientists matchless research opportunities. Devon Island’s harsh climate and barren terrain endeared it to NASA as the Arctic day and night cycle and restricted communications capabilities offer challenges similar to those presented by long-duration space flights.
HMP has conducted geology, hydrology, botany, and microbiology studies in this harsh environment since 1997. HMP-2008 was the twelfth field season at Devon Island.
On July 16, 2013, the Canadian Space Agency assigned Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen to a secondment with the CPSX of the University of Western Ontario at Haughton Crater in preparation for a potential future crewed exploration of Mars, the Moon or the .
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