In this exclusive excerpt from Dazed & Confused’s forthcoming
space-themed June issue, Dr Pascal Lee writes about his time on
Mars For the past 15 years, I have been going up to the Arctic
every summer to study one of the most Mars-like places on Earth:
Devon Island. Devon is the world’s largest uninhabited island.
It is about the size of Croatia. When we are on Devon, we are
its population. The island is home to Haughton Crater, a mighty
20 km-wide meteorite impact crater that formed 39 million years
ago when an asteroid or a comet – we are still not sure –
slammed into our planet. Haughton is the only known crater on
Earth that is located in a polar desert, an environment that is
at once very cold, dry, rocky, dusty, packed with underground
ice, and drenched in UV light. The similarities with Mars don’t
stop here. Aside from Haughton Crater, Devon Island offers us an
astounding array of other geologic features that look just like
what we see on Mars: canyons, gullies, valley networks, rock
glaciers, polygon