New Siberian Islands

• 1. Introduction

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  The New Siberian Islands sit in the Extreme North of Russia, wedged between the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, north of the Sakha Republic. They are not simply remote islands. They are the exposed peaks of a vast submerged plain that once connected Siberia to Alaska. At the height of the last ice age, sea level here stood 100 to 120 meters below where it is today. The coastline lay 700 to 1,000 kilometers north of its current position. What is now open ocean was once dry land, and these islands were merely low hills rising from a continuous Arctic plain stretching across some 1.6 million square kilometers.

  How do you explain mammoth skeletons frozen in cliffs above the sea? Why did a Russian polar explorer devote his career to chasing a land that may not exist? And what do the oldest rocks of these islands tell us about a world hundreds of millions of years in the making? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Search for Sannikov Land

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  A Cossack named Yakov Permyakov brought the first reports of the New Siberian Islands to wider attention at the start of the 18th century. In 1712, a Cossack unit led by M. Vagin made it as far as Great Lyakhovsky Island. These early visits were reconnaissance, not science.

  The cartographic ambitions came later. In 1809-10, Yakov Sannikov and Matvei Gedenschtrom traveled to the islands on a mapping expedition. Sannikov reported spotting what he described as a new land to the north of Kotelny Island in 1811. That sighting lodged itself in the imagination of Russian explorers for generations. The supposed landmass became known as Zemlya Sannikova, or Sannikov Land.

  Eduard Toll, a Russian polar explorer and scientist, first visited the New Siberian Islands in 1886. He believed he too had glimpsed an unknown land north of Kotelny Island, and he guessed it matched the legendary Zemlya Sannikova. The vision was enough to draw him back. In early 1892, Toll returned to the islands with one Cossack and three local guides, traveling by dog sled over the ice to the south coast of Great Lyakhovsky Island. What he found along those cliffs would prove more remarkable than any phantom landmass.

• 3. Cliffs Frozen in Time

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  Along the southern coast of Great Lyakhovsky Island, Toll documented sea cliffs rising 40 meters above the water. Inside those cliffs, exposed by erosion, lay Late Pleistocene sediments cemented solid by permafrost. Toll found bones, ivory, peat, wood, and even a preserved tree within the rock face.

  Those sediments had been accumulating over the previous 200,000 years, laid down periodically in loess, solifluction, pond, and stream deposits as the climate cycled through ice ages and warm spells. Radiocarbon dating of bones and ivory, uranium-thorium dating of associated peats, and optically stimulated luminescence dating of the sediments themselves all confirm that window of time.

  The scale of what was buried here is difficult to take in. Radiocarbon dates drawn from the collagen of 87 mammoth tusks and bones collected from Faddeevsky, Kotelniy, and New Siberia islands spanned from 9,470 plus or minus 40 years before present to more than 50,000 years before present. Alongside the mammoth remains, researchers found bones and even whole skeletons of rhinoceros, musk-ox, and other megafauna, all sealed in permafrost.

• 4. A Plain Swallowed by the Sea

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  During the Last Glacial Maximum, roughly 17,000 to 24,000 BC, the New Siberian Islands were not islands at all. They were hills on the Great Arctic Plain, a vast expanse of dry land that formed the northern portion of the region known as Beringia, the land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska.

  The plain escaped the heavy glaciation that shaped so much of the Northern Hemisphere during that period. It lay in the rain shadow of the Northern European ice sheet, so the massive ice sheets that buried Scandinavia and much of Canada did not form here. Instead, small passive ice caps built up only on the adjacent De Long Islands. Fragments of those ice caps survive today on Jeannette, Henrietta, and Bennett Islands. Traces of older slope and cirque glaciers survive as buried ground ice on Zhokhov Island.

  When the glaciers elsewhere began to melt, sea level rose fast. The Great Arctic Plain, all of it except for the highest points that are now the New Siberian Islands and a few other isolated outcrops, went under water within a span of roughly 7,000 years during the Early-Middle Holocene. The sea that swallowed it became portions of what is now the Arctic Ocean, the East Siberian Sea, and the Laptev Sea.

• 5. Rocks Older Than Memory

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  The islands read like a compressed archive of geological time. The Lyakhovsky Islands, the southernmost group, hold Precambrian metamorphic rocks at their core, some of the oldest material on the surface of these islands, alongside Paleozoic to Triassic sandstones and shales, Jurassic to lower Cretaceous turbidites, Cretaceous granites, and ophiolites.

  The Anzhu Islands, which form the main body of the archipelago, show a similarly complex layering: Ordovician to Devonian limestones, dolomites, sandstones, and volcanoclastic rocks sit beneath a sequence running through Triassic sandstones and shales, Jurassic turbidites, and upper Cretaceous to Pliocene sediments. The De Long Islands, the small northeastern cluster, feature early and middle Paleozoic rocks alongside Cretaceous and Neogene deposits, much of the igneous material being basalt.

  All of these ancient formations are draped with younger loose sediments from the Pleistocene and Holocene. Those surface deposits range from a fraction of a meter in thickness to about 35 meters. A researcher named Digby was among the first to point out that early published accounts of the islands often mischaracterized their geology entirely, sometimes claiming the islands were composed almost entirely of mammoth bones and ice. Later work by professional geologists, paleontologists, and other scientists demonstrated those accounts were fictional, often written by people who had never set foot on the islands and were relying on trader folklore.

• 6. Life, Climate, and the Long Dark

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  The entire archipelago has been designated an Important Bird Area by BirdLife International, which recognized the islands as supporting breeding populations of many bird species.

  For the birds and anything else that lives here, the environment is extreme. The climate is classified as polar under the Koppen system, specifically the ET designation for tundra climates. Snow covers the ground for nine months of the year. Annual precipitation reaches up to 132 millimeters. Continuous permafrost underlies the whole archipelago, rich in underground ice, and the surface carries Arctic tundra vegetation and numerous lakes.

  Temperatures at the coasts stay relatively low even in summer because of icy Arctic water. Coastal July temperatures average a maximum of 8 to 11 degrees Celsius. In the interior, where the water's influence fades, July maximums reach 16 to 19 degrees Celsius. The surrounding ocean stays ice-covered for most of the year. In warm years, it opens briefly for navigation from July through October; in cold years, the ice never breaks up. Polar night conditions persist from November through February, while in summer the sun does not set for months.

  In September 2014, Russia re-established a naval base on Kotelny Island, reviving a Soviet-era facility that had been abandoned since 1993. The highest point of the entire island group sits on Bennett Island, at an elevation of 426 meters.