Kara Sea

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kara Sea freezes over for all but two months of the year, locking its waters in ice from September to May. On 16th-century maps it carried a Latin name, Oceanus Scythicus, and elsewhere Mare Glaciale, the icy sea. For three centuries that ice kept it almost unexplored. Roughly 1,450 kilometers long and 970 kilometers wide, this marginal arm of the Arctic Ocean stretches north of Siberia, walled off by archipelagos at either end. Beneath it lies undeveloped petroleum and natural gas. Above it, for most of the year, lies a sheet of ice that has trapped explorers, hidden warships, and now conceals scuttled reactors on the seafloor. Why does a sea named after a relatively insignificant river matter so much? Who tried to cross it, and what did the ice do to them? And what did the Soviet Union sink beneath its surface between 1965 and 1988? The answers begin with the water itself and the rivers that feed it.

• 2. A Sea Of Rivers

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  Freshwater pours into the Kara Sea at a rate of roughly 1,200 cubic kilometers per year, draining off the Russian mainland. The Ob, the Yenisei, the Pyasina, the Pur, and the Taz all empty here between May and August. This flood of river water makes the sea's circulation unusually complex. Simulations using the Hamburg shelf ocean model suggest no single, reliable current pattern holds across the whole year. Instead the currents shift with the freshwater run-off, the dominant winds, and the way sea ice forms each season. Water also arrives from the west, flowing in from the Barents Sea. That inflow measures 0.6 sverdrups in August and rises to 2.6 sverdrups in December. It began as Atlantic water, but the Barents Sea cooled it and mixed it with freshwater before it reached the Kara. The geography matches this layered identity. The Kara Strait and Novaya Zemlya separate the sea from the Barents to the west, while the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago divides it from the Laptev Sea to the east. The coast itself folds into a chain of bays and gulfs, counter-clockwise from Baydaratskaya Bay through the Gulf of Ob, the Taz Estuary, Gydan Bay, the Yenisei Gulf, and on to Toll Bay. The Kara river that gives the sea its name flows into Baydaratskaya Bay, and its name comes from a Nenets word meaning hummocked ice.

• 3. Islands In Open Water

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  Most Arctic marginal seas keep their islands hugging the coast. The Kara Sea breaks that rule. Many of its islands sit far out in the open water of its central regions, including the Arkticheskiy Institut Islands, the Izvesti Tsik Islands, the Kirov Islands, Wiese Island, and Voronina Island. One bears the name Uedineniya, also called Lonely Island. The largest cluster by far is the Nordenskiöld Archipelago, made up of five large subgroups and more than ninety islands. Other notable land includes Bely Island, Dikson Island, Taymyr Island, the Kamennyye Islands, and Oleni Island. Despite sitting at such a high latitude, nearly all of these islands are free of glaciers. The single exception is Ushakov Island, at the extreme northern edge of the sea. The sea's northern boundary itself runs as a line on the map, from Cape Kohlsaat in Graham Bell Island, part of Franz Josef Land, across to Cape Molotov, also called Arctic Cape. That second point is the northernmost tip of Komsomolets Island in Severnaya Zemlya, and Ushakov Island lies out near that frozen limit.

• 4. The Ice Defeats Them

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  In 1556 Stephen Borough sailed the Searchthrift toward the Ob River, only to be stopped by ice and fog at the entrance to the Kara Sea. England tried again in 1580, sending Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman to attempt the passage. They failed too, and England gave up the search for the Northeast Passage. Russian persistence fared better. Between 1736 and 1737, Admiral Stepan Malygin set out from Dolgy Island in the Barents Sea with two ships, the Perviy under his own command and the Vtoroy under Captain A. Skuratov. They pushed into the little-explored Kara Sea and reached the mouth of the Ob River. Malygin's careful observations let him draw the first reasonably accurate map of the Arctic coast between the Pechora River and the Ob. The breakthrough came in 1878. The Finnish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld sailed the Vega from Gothenburg across the Kara Sea and along the Siberian coast. By early September he had reached 180 degrees longitude, then froze in for the winter in the Chukchi Sea. There he waited and bartered with the local Chukchi people. The following July the Vega broke free and sailed on to Yokohama, Japan, making Nordenskiöld the first to force the Northeast Passage. In those same years Christian Dahl studied the sea's sailing conditions and helped open a direct trade route from central Siberia to Western Europe. The Nordenskiöld Archipelago was named in Dahl's honour.

• 5. The Year 1912

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  Unbroken consolidated ice sealed the Northern Sea Route in 1912, and three Russian expeditions paid for it. Georgy Sedov's St. Foka, Georgy Brusilov's St. Anna, and Vladimir Rusanov's Gercules all became trapped, and all three failed. Sedov had planned to reach Franz Josef Land, leave a depot, and sledge to the pole. The ice let his vessel get only as far as Novaya Zemlya the first summer, and he wintered in Franz Josef Land. In February 1914 he headed for the North Pole with two sailors and three sledges. He fell ill and died on Rudolf Island. Brusilov's St. Anna drifted northward for more than two years, reaching latitude 83 degrees 17 minutes north. Thirteen men led by Valerian Albanov left the ship and struck out across the ice for Franz Josef Land. After a three-month ordeal, only Albanov and one sailor, Alexander Konrad, survived. They carried out the ship's log, the map of her drift, and daily meteorological records. The fate of those who stayed aboard is still unknown. Rusanov's expedition simply vanished in the Kara Sea that same year. The long silence from all three drew public attention and prompted small rescue efforts, including Jan Nagórski's five flights over the sea and ice from the northwest coast of Novaya Zemlya.

• 6. Mapping And War

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  After the Russian Revolution of 1917, exploration of the Kara Sea expanded sharply as part of developing the Northern Sea Route. Polar stations multiplied to provide meteorological data, ice reconnaissance, and radio contact. Five already existed in 1917. By 1932 there were 24, by 1948 roughly 80, and by the 1970s more than 100. Icebreakers, and later aircraft, became platforms for scientific work. In 1929 and 1930 the icebreaker Sedov ferried scientists to Severnaya Zemlya, the last major piece of unsurveyed Soviet Arctic territory. Georgy Ushakov led the complete mapping of that archipelago between 1930 and 1932. Three cruises of the icebreaker Sadko pressed farther north than most. In 1935 and 1936 they examined the last unexplored areas of the northern Kara Sea and discovered the small, elusive Ushakov Island. War reached these waters in the summer of 1942. German Kriegsmarine warships and submarines entered the Kara Sea to sink as many Russian vessels as they could, in a campaign called Operation Wunderland. Ice floes, bad weather, and fog limited its success. The same conditions that had wrecked explorers now shielded the Soviet fleet from the damage clear skies would have allowed.

• 7. What Lies Beneath

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  Between 1965 and 1988, the Soviet Union dumped six nuclear submarine reactors and ten nuclear reactors into the Kara Sea. That figure comes from an official White Paper the Russian government compiled and released in March 1993. Solid high- and low-level waste, unloaded from Northern Fleet submarines during reactor refuelings, went mainly into the shallow fjords of Novaya Zemlya, at depths from 12 to 135 meters, and into the Novaya Zemlya Trough at depths reaching 380 meters. The International Atomic Energy Agency later appraised the sites and found releases to be low and localized from 16 naval reactors, traced to seven submarines and the icebreaker Lenin, dumped at five sites. Most of those reactors had suffered an accident. The Soviet submarine K-27 was scuttled in Stepovogo Bay with both its reactors still loaded with spent nuclear fuel. At a seminar in February 2012, it emerged that those reactors could re-achieve criticality, a buildup of heat that could lead to a steam explosion. Documents seen by Bellona put the wider catalogue at some 17,000 containers of radioactive waste, 19 ships carrying such waste, 14 nuclear reactors, of which five still hold spent fuel, 735 other pieces of contaminated heavy machinery, and the K-27 itself. The fishing grounds and the modern oil prospects share these waters with all of it.

• 8. Oil, Ports, And A Reserve

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  Novy Port and Dikson serve as the Kara Sea's main ports, and the sea matters as a fishing ground despite being ice-bound for ten months a year. Below the seabed sits the East-Prinovozemelsky field, an extension of the West Siberian Oil Basin, holding significant undeveloped petroleum and natural gas. In October 2010 the Russian government granted Rosneft a license to develop the East-Prinovozemelsky oil and gas structure. The international politics arrived in 2014, when US government sanctions gave Exxon until the 26th of September to halt its operations in the sea. Conservation has its own foothold here. The Great Arctic State Nature Reserve, the largest in Russia, was founded on the 11th of May 1993 by Resolution No. 431 of the Government of the Russian Federation. Its Kara Sea Islands section covers 4,000 square kilometers and takes in the Sergei Kirov Archipelago, Voronina Island, the Izvestiy TSIK Islands, the Arctic Institute Islands, Sverdrup Island, Uedineniya, and a scattering of smaller islands. That section was chosen to represent the natural diversity of Arctic sea islands in the sea's eastern part. Nearby, Franz Josef Land and Severny Island in northern Novaya Zemlya are registered as the Russian Arctic National Park.