Curated playlist
Geography of Northeast Asia
- Siberian River RoutesSiberian River Routes were the arteries of an empire in motion. In just 57 years, from 1582 to 1639, Russian Cossacks moved from the Ural Mountains all the way to the Pacific Ocean. That is roughly the distance from London to Kabul,…
- Arctic OceanAt roughly 14,060,000 square kilometers, the Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the world's five oceanic divisions, and it is also the coldest. Its average depth runs to only 1,038 meters. For most of the year, a skin of ice…
- Kuril IslandsThe Kuril Islands stretch roughly 1,300 kilometres from the northern tip of Hokkaido all the way to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, and today they sit at the center of one of the longest-running territorial disputes in the world. Fifty-six…
- Kamchatka PeninsulaThe Kamchatka Peninsula stretches 1,250 kilometers into the Pacific from Russia's far eastern edge, a finger of land so remote that it remained closed to foreigners until 1990. Wedged between the Sea of Okhotsk to the west and the Bering…
- Sea of OkhotskThe Sea of Okhotsk sits at the northwestern edge of the Pacific Ocean, pressed between Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, the Kuril Islands, Japan's island of Hokkaido, and a long ribbon of eastern Siberian coastline. Its name traces back to a…
- ArcticThe Arctic takes its name from a bear. The Greek word arktikos means "near the Bear, northern," and arktos means "bear," pointing skyward to the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor that hang over the northern celestial sphere. This is…
- SakhalinSakhalin is a Russian island that sits at the edge of two worlds, separated from the Asian mainland by just 6.5 km at its narrowest point, yet positioned close enough to Japan's Hokkaido to feel the pull of two competing empires. At 72,492…
- Sea of JapanThe Sea of Japan sits in near-total isolation from the Pacific Ocean, enclosed by the Japanese archipelago, the Korean Peninsula, Sakhalin, and the Russian Far East. That enclosure shapes almost everything about it: the salinity is lower…
- Sakha RepublicThe Sakha Republic covers more than 3,083,523 square kilometres of the Russian Far East, making it the single largest country subdivision on Earth. It is larger than Argentina, yet home to only about one million people. Its capital,…
- Bering StraitThe Bering Strait is only 82 km wide at its narrowest point, yet that slim channel of frigid water has divided two continents, shaped human history, and sparked some of the most ambitious engineering dreams ever conceived. Stand at Cape…