On October 9, 1949, a C-47 cargo plane of the United States Air Force crashed on takeoff at the weather station.

The subsequent investigation blamed the accident on the plane being overloaded and attempting to take off with ice building up on the cockpit windshield and wings.

Photos of the remains of Isachsen Station can be seen on the Hilux Arctic Challenge website,[8] taken by the Top Gear team on their trip to the nearby 1996 North Magnetic Pole.

The Isachsen Station was in an extremely isolated place, with supplies and new personnel flown in by the Royal Canadian Air Force, usually twice a year: in the late spring, and again in the early fall from an air base (now Resolute Bay Airport) at Resolute on Cornwallis Island.

In turn, Resolute Station, like most northern communities, was supplied using ocean-going cargo ships aided by icebreakers during the late summer sealift.

During the summer of 1958, the Isachsen station was rebuilt using prefabricated buildings that had been airlifted in along with about a dozen construction personnel.

An Automated Surface Observing System was placed at the site in 1989, linked by satellite communications to southern Canada.

Each time, six or seven researchers used each other as participants in investigations of the effects of isolation, remoteness, and cold on psychological and physiological processes such as taste perception, irritability, mood, subjective and hormonal measures of stress, brain waves, and sleep patterns.

In 1992, a survey was made of abandoned vehicles, fuel drums, and potential contaminants to assist Environment and Climate Change Canada in planning to remove such items from the site.