Eureka is a small research base on
Fosheim Peninsula,
Ellesmere Island
Ellesmere Island (; ) is Canada's northernmost and List of Canadian islands by area, third largest island, and the List of islands by area, tenth largest in the world. It comprises an area of , slightly smaller than Great Britain, and the total ...
,
Qikiqtaaluk Region, in the
Canadian territory of
Nunavut
Nunavut is the largest and northernmost Provinces and territories of Canada#Territories, territory of Canada. It was separated officially from the Northwest Territories on April 1, 1999, via the ''Nunavut Act'' and the Nunavut Land Claims Agr ...
. It is located on the north side of Slidre Fiord, which enters
Eureka Sound farther west. It is the third-northernmost permanent research community in the world. The only two farther north are
Alert, which is also on Ellesmere Island, and
Nord, in
Greenland
Greenland is an autonomous territory in the Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark. It is by far the largest geographically of three constituent parts of the kingdom; the other two are metropolitan Denmark and the Faroe Islands. Citizens of Greenlan ...
. Eureka has the lowest average annual temperature and the lowest amount of precipitation of any weather station in Canada.
Eureka's
postal code
A postal code (also known locally in various English-speaking countries throughout the world as a postcode, post code, PIN or ZIP Code) is a series of letters or numerical digit, digits or both, sometimes including spaces or punctuation, inclu ...
is X0A 0G0 and the
area code
A telephone numbering plan is a type of numbering scheme used in telecommunication to assign telephone numbers to subscriber telephones or other telephony endpoints. Telephone numbers are the addresses of participants in a telephone network, rea ...
is
867.
Divisions
The base consists of three areas:
*the
Eureka Aerodrome
Eureka Aerodrome is located at Eureka, Nunavut
Nunavut is the largest and northernmost Provinces and territories of Canada#Territories, territory of Canada. It was separated officially from the Northwest Territories on April 1, 1999, via ...
which includes "Fort Eureka" (the quarters for military personnel maintaining the island's communications equipment)
*the
Environment and Climate Change Canada Weather Station
*the
Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL), formerly the Arctic Stratospheric Ozone Observatory (AStrO)
PEARL is operated by a consortium of Canadian university researchers and government agencies known as the Canadian Network for Detection of Atmospheric Change. PEARL announced it would cease full-time year-round operation as of April 30, 2012, due to lack of funding, but this decision was reversed in May 2013 with the announcement of new funds.
History
Eureka was founded on April 7, 1947, as part of an initiative to set up a network of Arctic
weather station
A weather station is a facility, either on land or sea, with instruments and equipment for measuring atmosphere of Earth, atmospheric conditions to provide information for weather forecasting, weather forecasts and to study the weather and clima ...
s. On this date, of supplies were airlifted to a promising spot on Ellesmere Island, and five prefabricated
Jamesway huts were constructed. Regular weather observations began on January 1, 1948. The station has expanded over the years. At its peak, in the 1970s, at least fifteen staff were on site; in 2005, it reported a permanent population of zero with at least eight staff on a continuous rotational basis.
Several generations of buildings have been developed. The latest operations centre, with work areas and staff quarters in one large structure, was completed in 2005.
Location and accessibility

The complex is powered by diesel generators. The station is supplied once every six weeks with fresh food and mail by air, and annually in the late summer, a supply ship from
Montreal
Montreal is the List of towns in Quebec, largest city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Quebec, the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-largest in Canada, and the List of North American cit ...
brings heavy supplies. On July 3, 2009, a Danish
Challenger 604 MMA jet landed at Eureka's aerodrome.
[
]
The jet is a military observation aircraft based on the Challenger executive jet. This jet visited Eureka on a familiarization trip, in order to prepare for the possibility of Danish aircraft assisting in
search and rescue
Search and rescue (SAR) is the search for and provision of aid to people who are in distress or imminent danger. The general field of search and rescue includes many specialty sub-fields, typically determined by the type of terrain the search ...
missions over Canadian territory. The
Canadian American Strategic Review noted critically that the first jet to fly a mission to Eureka was not Canadian.
At Eureka's latitude, a geosynchronous
communications satellite
A communications satellite is an artificial satellite that relays and amplifies radio telecommunication signals via a Transponder (satellite communications), transponder; it creates a communication channel between a source transmitter and a Rad ...
, if due south, would require an
antenna to be pointed nearly horizontally; satellites farther east or west along that orbit would be below the horizon. Telephone access and television broadcasts arrived in 1982 when
Operation Hurricane resulted in the establishment of a satellite receiving station at nearby Skull Point, which has an open view to the south. The low-power Channel 9 TV transmitter at Skull Point was the world's most northern TV station at the time. In the 1980s, TV audio was often connected to the telephone to feed CBC-TV news to
CHAR-FM in isolated
CFS Alert. More recently, CANDAC has installed what is likely the world's most northerly
geosynchronous
A geosynchronous orbit (sometimes abbreviated GSO) is an Earth-centered orbit with an orbital period that matches Earth's rotation on its axis, 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds (one sidereal day). The synchronization of rotation and orbital ...
satellite ground-station to provide Internet-based communications to PEARL.
Other inhabited places on Ellesmere Island include Alert
and
Grise Fiord.
Flora and fauna
Eureka has been described as "The Garden Spot of the Arctic" due to the flora and fauna abundant around the Eureka area, more so than anywhere else in the High Arctic. Fauna include
polar bears,
muskox,
Arctic wolves,
Arctic foxes,
Arctic hares, and
lemmings. In addition, summer nesting geese, ducks, owls, loons, ravens, gulls and many other smaller birds nest, raise their young, and return south in August.
Climate
Eureka experiences a
polar climate
The polar climate regions are characterized by a lack of warm summers but with varying winters. Every month a polar climate has an average temperature of less than . Regions with a polar climate cover more than 20% of the Earth's area. Most of ...
(''
ET''). The settlement sees the
midnight sun
Midnight sun, also known as polar day, is a natural phenomenon that occurs in the summer months in places north of the Arctic Circle or south of the Antarctic Circle, when the Sun remains visible at the local midnight. When midnight sun is see ...
between April 10 and August 29, with no sunlight at all between mid-October and late February. Eureka has the lowest average annual temperature and least precipitation of any weather station in Canada with an annual mean temperature of . In fact, that is even colder than the Siberian "
poles of cold",
Verkhoyansk and
Oymyakon
Oymyakon is a types of inhabited localities in Russia, rural locality (a ''village#Russia, selo'') in Oymyakonsky District of the Sakha Republic, Russia, located in the Yana-Oymyakon Highlands, along the Indigirka River, northwest of Tomtor, Oy ...
with an average annual temperature of and respectively. Although the latter two have colder winter (December, January, February) temperatures than Eureka (, , and respectively). Average winter temperatures are almost comparable to those found in northeastern Siberia. However, summers are slightly warmer than other places in the
Arctic Archipelago because Eureka is somewhat landlocked, being near the centre of
Ellesmere Island
Ellesmere Island (; ) is Canada's northernmost and List of Canadian islands by area, third largest island, and the List of islands by area, tenth largest in the world. It comprises an area of , slightly smaller than Great Britain, and the total ...
. Even so, since record keeping began, the temperature has never exceeded , first reached on July 14, 2009.
Although a polar desert, evaporation is also very low, which allows the limited moisture to be made available for plants and wildlife. Its frost-free season averages 56 days, much longer than many other places nearby.
See also
*
List of research stations in the Arctic
A list is a set of discrete items of information collected and set forth in some format for utility, entertainment, or other purposes. A list may be memorialized in any number of ways, including existing only in the mind of the list-maker, but ...
References
Bibliography
* Couture, Nicole J. ''Sensitivity of Permafrost Terrain in a High Arctic Polar Desert An Evaluation of Response to Disturbance Near Eureka, Ellesmere Island, Nunavut''. Ottawa: National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2003.
* Whyte, L. G., B. Goalen, J. Hawari, D. Labbe, C. W. Greer, and M. Nahir. 2001. "Bioremediation Treatability Assessment of Hydrocarbon-Contaminated Soils from Eureka, Nunavut". ''Cold Regions Science and Technology''. 32, no. 2-3: 121–132.
Eureka at the Atlas of Canada
External links
*
{{Subdivisions of Nunavut
Populated places established in 1947
Extreme points of Canada
Weather extremes of Earth
Ellesmere Island
Arctic research
Populated places in Arctic Canada
Populated places in the Qikiqtaaluk Region
1947 establishments in the Northwest Territories
Meteorological stations