Short answers, pulled from the story.
Two parties have credible claims. Norwegian captain Nils Fredrik Rønnbeck and harpooner Johan Petter Aidijärvi sighted the islands in 1865 aboard the sealing vessel Spidsbergen, but never announced their finding. The first publicly reported discovery was by the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition of 1872-1874, led by Julius von Payer and Karl Weyprecht, who named the archipelago after Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria.
Julius von Payer and Karl Weyprecht, leaders of the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition of 1872-1874, named the archipelago in honor of Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, who was born in 1830. Their expedition aboard the schooner Tegetthoff was the first to publicly announce the discovery of the islands.
The Soviet Union declared its annexation of Franz Josef Land on the 15th of April 1926, invoking the sector principle to claim all land between the Soviet mainland and the North Pole. Both Norway and Italy protested the claim, and the sector principle has never gained international recognition.
Franz Josef Land consists of 192 islands covering an area of 16,134 square kilometers, stretching 375 km from east to west and 234 km from north to south. Approximately 85 percent of the archipelago is glaciated. Cape Fligely on Rudolf Island is the northernmost point of the Eastern Hemisphere, and the islands are located 900 km from the North Pole.
Yes. Nazi Germany operated a secret weather station called Schatzgräber on Alexandra Land as part of the North Atlantic weather war. The station was evacuated in 1944 after the crew contracted trichinosis from eating polar bear meat. Physical evidence of the base was not discovered until 2016.
The archipelago supports 41 bird species, of which 14 breed on the islands, including fulmars, kittiwakes, Brünnich's guillemots, and little auks. Polar bears on the islands belong to the Barents Sea subpopulation, which was estimated at 2,650 individuals in 2004. Three species of seals are found there, along with walruses, which have been internationally protected since 1952 and number between one and three thousand in the archipelago.