Severnaya Zemlya

• 1. Introduction

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  Severnaya Zemlya is a 37,000-square-kilometer archipelago sitting in the Russian high Arctic, separated from Siberia's Taymyr Peninsula by the Vilkitsky Strait. It is the last sizeable archipelago on Earth to be discovered and mapped. That distinction is extraordinary: by 1913, humans had reached the South Pole, photographed the Milky Way, and mapped nearly every coastline on the planet. And yet an island group roughly the size of Switzerland, lying just off a continental shore, remained unknown to cartographers. How did that happen? And what did it take to finally chart it? Those are the questions at the center of this story. There is also the question of what the archipelago holds, from the largest glacier in all of Russia to a population of Arctic lemmings so dense they can reach 500 individuals per square kilometer. Severnaya Zemlya is a place that resisted being known, and that resistance shaped almost everything about its history.

• 2. Hidden in Plain Sight

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  Matvei Gedenschtrom and Yakov Sannikov filed a report in 1810 that suggested a land mass lay somewhere north of Siberia. They had seen something on the horizon while exploring the New Siberian Islands, but the ice and the weather would not let them reach it. Their report sat unconfirmed for over a century.

  Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld sailed within range of Severnaya Zemlya in 1878 during the Vega expedition, which would later make history navigating the Northeast Passage. He passed close enough, and saw nothing. In 1882, the Danish naval officer Andreas Peter Hovgaard set out explicitly to find land north of Cape Chelyuskin and to explore the eastern limits of the Kara Sea. He was stopped cold by thick ice and never reached the Taymyr Peninsula's shores, let alone what lay beyond.

  Nansen's Fram expedition in 1895 crossed the strait between the Kara and Laptev Seas, a passage only about 55 kilometers wide at that point, and still detected nothing to the north. Eduard Toll's Russian polar expedition of 1900-1902 aboard the ship Zarya did the same. The islands, perpetually shrouded and ice-bound, simply did not announce themselves. The strait the explorers crossed would later bear the name Vilkitsky, after the man who finally solved the mystery.

• 3. Discovery and the Flag

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  On the 3rd of September 1913, members of an Imperial Russian icebreaker expedition stepped ashore on what is now called Cape Berg, on what is now called October Revolution Island. They raised a Russian flag and named the territory Tayvay Land, stitching together the first syllables of their two ships, the Taimyr and the Vaigach.

  The expedition had been privately financed and launched in 1910. Boris Vilkitsky led it on behalf of the Russian Hydrographic Service, with the mission of mapping the continental side of the Northern Sea Route. Among those who organized and initially captained the Vaygach was Aleksandr Vasiliyevich Kolchak, an officer in the Imperial Russian Navy who would later become a major figure in the Russian Civil War.

  Vilkitsky's team initially believed the land they had discovered was a single island. In the days after the landing, they charted portions of its Laptev Sea coast without realizing they were looking at an archipelago. Barely six months after that landing, the Secretary of the Imperial Navy issued an order. The name Tayvay Land was erased. The new territory was renamed Emperor Nicholas II Land, in honour of the reigning tsar. The name lasted thirteen years.

• 4. Soviet Renaming and the Mapping Expedition

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  In 1926, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR struck Emperor Nicholas II Land from the maps. The renamed archipelago became Severnaya Zemlya, meaning Northern Land. The territory still had no accurate chart.

  In May 1928, Umberto Nobile and his crew in the Airship Italia tried to fly over the islands. Adverse weather turned them back when they were only an hour or two from reaching the coastline. The archipelago remained unmapped.

  The work of actually surveying Severnaya Zemlya fell to Georgy Ushakov. In the spring of 1931, Ushakov set out with three companions: the geologist Nikolay Urvantsev, the surveyor Sergei Zhuravlev, and the radio-operator Vasily Khodov. They based themselves at Golomyanny, on the western end of Sredniy Island just off October Revolution Island's western coast. Over two years, the four men made repeated surveying trips into the island interiors and along the coastlines. Their first detailed map revealed not one island but four main ones. Ushakov later described Severnaya Zemlya with unsparing bleakness. Having seen Chukotka, Wrangel Island, Novaya Zemlya, and Franz Josef Land, he wrote that nowhere had he witnessed such grimness or such depressing, lifeless relief. Around the same time, the Graf Zeppelin passed over during its polar flight of July 1931, and Hugo Eckener attempted to photograph the western coast. Cloud and fog obscured it entirely.

• 5. Names as Political Acts

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  Geographic names in Severnaya Zemlya function as a record of Soviet political history. When Ushakov's expedition completed its map in 1931-1932, features across the archipelago were named after communist organisations, events, and personalities. Some were named in solidarity with communists beyond the USSR, including German communists who had faced persecution.

  After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, that solidarity curdled. The names honoring German communist figures were quietly replaced. Cape Unslicht became Mys Peschanyy. Proliv Yungshturm became Yuny Strait. Anti-German sentiment during and after the 1941-1945 German-Soviet War drove the changes.

  The process of political renaming ran in multiple directions and continued long after the Soviet era. The island named Maly Taymyr had been discovered by Boris Vilkitsky himself during the 1913 expedition and originally named Tsarevich Alexei Island, after the son of Tsar Nicholas II. After the October Revolution of 1917, it became Maly Taymyr. In 2005, a formal request was made to reinstate the name Alexei Island. A separate request has also been filed to restore the archipelago's own imperial name, Emperor Nicholas II Land. As of recent years, the Krasnoyarsk Krai local government has rejected that request.

• 6. The Ice That Defines the Land

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  The Academy of Sciences Glacier on Komsomolets Island covers about two-thirds of that island's surface and reaches 749 meters above sea level. At 5,575 square kilometers and 819 meters thick, it is the largest ice cap in Russia. Its most active glacier fronts face east toward Krenkel Bay and south. A second major glacier, the Rusanov Glacier on October Revolution Island, terminates at Matusevich Fjord.

  October Revolution Island has seven individual glaciers, more than any other island in the group. It also holds the highest point in the entire archipelago: the 965-meter Mount Karpinsky. Bolshevik Island, the southernmost of the main islands, is comparatively less glaciated. About 30 percent of its surface is covered by ice, and its interior glaciers, including the Leningrad, Kropotkin, and Mushketov glaciers, do not reach the sea.

  For much of recorded history, ice connected Severnaya Zemlya to the Eurasian landmass even during the late summer melt season, effectively blocking the Northeast Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific. By the late summer of 2012, Arctic sea ice decline had reduced that permanent ice to a record low extent, and open water appeared to the south of the archipelago. Schmidt Island, at the far northwestern end of the group, had previously sat year-round in permanent sea ice. Its position and exposure make its local climate measurably colder than the rest of Severnaya Zemlya.

• 7. Life at the Edge

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  Thirty-two bird species have been observed on Severnaya Zemlya, according to a survey by De Korte, Volkov, and Gavrilo. Seventeen of those species breed on the islands. Eight are found across the archipelago: five colonial seabirds, including the ivory gull and the little auk, and three tundra birds: the snow bunting, the purple sandpiper, and the brent goose.

  The collared lemming, also known as the Arctic lemming, is the most common mammal across all the main islands. In some locations the population density has been recorded at 500 individuals per square kilometer. Arctic foxes have denned on the islands as well, with several hundred observed during the 1980s. Polar bears, wolves, walruses, and reindeer appear occasionally.

  The vegetation is classified as polar desert. Permafrost begins at less than 50 centimeters below the surface. Rare vascular plants include species of Cerastium and Saxifraga, and the purple saxifrage and the Arctic poppy both grow here. Thelodonti fossils from the Upper Silurian have been found on Pioneer Island, pointing to a very different ancient environment beneath the current ice.

  Currently no permanent human population lives in Severnaya Zemlya, with the single exception of the Prima Polar Station near Cape Baranov on Bolshevik Island. The Golomyanniy Meteorological Station on Sredniy Island, which served as Ushakov's base in 1931-1932, has taken continuous measurements since 1954.