Where on Earth would you actually stand up a Mars colony sim?
Not a two-week habitat stay. A real base you add to every two years, the same cadence a Starship wave would use.
I have been looking at temperature, isolation, cold and dust. Those are the obvious ones. The rest matter just as much.
You also need extreme dryness, rocky or cratered terrain, permafrost or ice you can pretend to mine, high UV, and logistics hard enough that every resupply feels like a 26-month wait.
Plus the boring but vital bits. Can you leave structures standing? Can you get permits? Can a crew actually fly in, work, and fly out without going broke?
No place on Earth gives you all of it. Each candidate wins some and loses some.
Here is the short list and why each one is in the running.
Devon Island, Nunavut
Largest uninhabited island on Earth. Polar desert. Haughton impact crater sitting right there.
NASA and the Mars Society have used it for years. Flashline station and the Haughton-Mars Project camp sit on the crater rim. Summer only, mostly. Winter it is empty.
Cold, rocky, dusty enough, permafrost, almost no plants. Isolation is real once you leave the airstrip. Resolute is about 165 km away.
The island is huge. You can site a new camp tens of kilometres from the existing ones and treat those camps as another outfit’s base. Rover traverse becomes part of the sim.
Biggest plus for a multi-year wave plan: you can actually put things on the ground and come back. Permits exist. They are not Antarctic-Treaty hard.
Biggest minus: everything still flies in on Twin Otter. Weather windows are short. Winter structures have to survive or you pack them out.
Strong all-rounder.
McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica
This is the surface-conditions champion.
Coldest, driest desert on the planet. Katabatic winds. Soils that have seen almost no rain for millions of years. High UV. Permafrost. Looks more like present-day Mars than almost anywhere else.
NASA has tested drills and life-detection gear here since the Viking era.
The problem is the paperwork and the cost.
It sits inside a specially managed area. Everything needs permits, environmental assessments and a scientific reason. Permanent private structures are basically off the table. You work out of McMurdo or Scott Base. Winter access is near zero.
Great for a high-fidelity field season. Painful if you want to leave a growing base for the next wave in two years.
Highest fidelity. Lowest practicality for the exact job we described.
Concordia Station and the high Antarctic plateau
This one wins isolation.
Nine months with no aircraft. Temperatures down to -80 C. 3,200 m altitude so you live with chronic hypoxia. Four months of darkness.
ESA has called it White Mars for a reason. Perfect for crew psychology, closed-loop life support and the “we are on our own” feeling.
The landscape itself is ice plateau. Not much help for geology, dust or building with local rock.
You also cannot just turn up and start adding modules. It is an existing national station with its own programme.
Best place on Earth to practise the long stay. Weakest place to practise standing a surface colony up from scratch.
Iceland
The builder’s choice.
Basaltic lava fields that look a lot like large parts of Mars. Ice meeting volcano. Almost no vegetation in the right spots. You can drive or fly in, get permits, and leave structures.
NASA and others already run rover and helicopter work there. Logistics are sane compared with the polar sites.
Isolation and cold are milder. Dust and dryness are only so-so. You will not fool anyone into thinking they are on the Martian equator in winter.
If the goal is “get a base going and keep adding to it every two years without going bankrupt,” this is the easiest place to iterate.
Less romance. More actual construction practice.
Greenland
Mostly ice sheet.
Useful if you want to practise polar ice mining or cryoconite studies. Remote enough in the right spots. Some coastal rocky ground exists.
It has been used more for Moon analog work than Mars surface work.
Terrain is the weak point for a rocky colony sim. Isolation is possible. Permits sit with Denmark and Greenland authorities, which is simpler than Antarctica but still not trivial.
A supporting site more than a lead site.
Atacama Desert, Chile
Driest non-polar desert on Earth. Perchlorate-rich soils. Fine dust. High UV. NASA loves it for rover and instrument tests.
Not cold enough and not isolated enough for the full colony-wave story. You can get to town. The night-time temperature drop is real but it is not polar.
Excellent for surface ops and soil chemistry. Incomplete for the “we are cut off for months” part.
Quick mentions
Hawaii volcano slopes for isolation habitats; Utah desert station for cheap, easy analog runs; Ladakh high-altitude cold desert; Deception Island for volcanic plus perchlorate notes. Each fills one gap. None replaces the ones above.
No single winner
Devon Island looks like the best compromise if you want both Mars-like ground and the chance to leave a growing base between two-year waves.
Dry Valleys win on raw surface match but lose on building anything lasting.
Concordia wins on isolation and human factors.
Iceland wins on being able to actually turn up and build.
The others fill specific gaps.
You could even use two sites. Summer construction and geology on Devon or Iceland. A winter-over isolation block somewhere like Concordia if you can get a berth.
That is the map as I see it.
Which one would you choose and why? Would you pick the place that looks most like Mars, the place you can actually build on, or the place that isolates the crew hardest?