Largest Arctic communal greenhouse

The largest communal greenhouse located within the Arctic Circle is the 16,000-sq-ft (1,486-m2) Inuvik Community Greenhouse – a converted school ice-hockey rink now used by locals to grow organic fruit and vegetables year round in the remote town of Inuvik (68.36° N) in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The idea for the project emerged in late 1998 and the greenhouse was in full production by spring 2000.

The greenhouse is maintained by a group of volunteers who contribute a small fee in order to grow their own produce within the facility. During winter in Inuvik, temperatures can plunge to as low as -40°C (-40°F) and there are around 30 days without any sunlight. What’s more, sometimes there can be limited availability of fresh produce in local supermarkets and many people don’t have access to their own gardens even if they wanted to grow their own food at home. For this reason, the Community Greenhouse has proven extremely popular and served as a successful blueprint for similar projects in remote Arctic settlements.

There is also a smaller 3,980-sq-ft (370-m2) commercial section to the Inuvik Community Greenhouse allocated to hydroponic vegetables and bedding plants, income from which helps to support the running costs of the facility and keep local gardeners’ contributions lower.

There are even more northerly greenhouses in this region, including other less large-scale community projects in Ulukhaktok (Victoria Island) and Sachs Harbour (Banks Island) that were inspired by Inuvik as well as, of course, private and commercial/agricultural greenhouse facilities.

Even farther north, on Devon Island (the world’s largest uninhabited island, located in Canada’s High Arctic), the Haughton Mars Project (co-managed by the Canadian Space Agency and NASA) installed the Arthur Clarke Mars Greenhouse at 75.4° N in 2002 to conduct research into the potential scope of growing produce on a future Martian colony.