The Alert wildlife team: biologists 817 km from the North Pole

Canadian Forces Station Alert, Ellesmere Island, Nunavut82°30′ N, 817 km from the Pole−50°C

Photos: the Alert wildlife research team (UQAR).

Alert sits at the northeastern tip of Ellesmere Island, in Nunavut, at 82°30′ north. The North Pole is 817 kilometres away. Ottawa is 4,151 kilometres away, and Stockholm is closer than Montreal.

National Defence describes it as “the northernmost permanently inhabited location in the world”. About 55 people live there, military and civilian, on rotations of three to six months.

The name comes from HMS Alert, a Royal Navy ship that wintered about ten kilometres away in 1875 and 1876. A weather station was set up on the coast in 1950. In 1958, the Canadian Forces opened a signals listening station there. Since 1975, Environment Canada has measured carbon dioxide in the air there, at the northernmost station of the Global Atmosphere Watch network.

Barely 17 millimetres of rain fall there each year. It's a desert. The sun disappears around October 10 and comes back in early March, then, from April to September, it never sets. On January 23, 1993, −45°C and a 40 km/h wind produced a wind chill of −71.

On July 14, 2019, the thermometer reached 21°C, the station's record high.

In 2018, the Université du Québec à Rimouski and National Defence opened a wildlife research lab there, the northernmost in the world. It is led by Dominique Berteaux, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Northern Biodiversity, and by François Vézina.

In 2019, the team fitted 25 Arctic hares with satellite collars. In the fall, 21 of them set off together for Lake Hazen, more than 70 kilometres away, and some travelled as far as 388 kilometres. It is the first documented migration in a hare (Scientific Reports, 2022).

The snow bunting, for its part, sometimes gets too warm. Above a felt temperature of 11.7°C, it has to feed its young less often to avoid overheating, and Alert has already had entire days above that threshold (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2022). In spring, lemmings come out onto the snow to warm up in the sun, even under the eyes of predators (Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2025).

In 2019, a good lemming year, the team counted four Arctic fox litters, one ermine litter and nine snowy owl broods.

In March 2025, one of the researchers wrote to us. He was looking for mittens for his team.

We sent ten pairs of outdoor mittens, in four sizes, in early June. The field season runs from June to the end of August, during the polar summer.

The verdict arrived on August 26.

Ten pairs of milkweed mittens spent the summer 817 kilometres from the Pole, on the hands of the people who count the hares, lemmings and snowy owls of the High Arctic.

The Alert photo journal

What the team brought back from the field season, between June and the end of August, the polar summer.

The Alert wildlife team

UQAR biologists, Ellesmere Island

Eight biologists, nine years of work at the northernmost wildlife lab in the world, 817 kilometres from the Pole. Their project: the first biodiversity management plan for the High Arctic, taking stock of what is there while it is still there.