Wrangel Island

• 1. Introduction

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  Wrangel Island sits astride the 180th meridian in the Arctic Ocean, a remote Russian territory so geographically peculiar that the International Date Line bends around it rather than cutting through it. The island is roughly the size of Crete, yet its name appears on almost no casual map and most people have never heard of it. Its nearest neighbor is the tiny, rocky Herald Island, just 60 km to the east. What draws the curious here is not simply the ice or the cold. Wrangel Island hosted the last known surviving population of woolly mammoths on Earth, alive thousands of years after the species had vanished everywhere else. It shelters the world's highest density of polar bear dens. Its plant life is twice as diverse as any other Arctic tundra territory of comparable size. And its human history is a tangle of competing national claims, a disastrous shipwreck, a lone indigenous woman who outlived four male companions, and a Soviet governor who turned the island into a private fiefdom. How this distant frozen island became all of those things at once is a story worth following.

• 2. The Last Mammoths

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  Woolly mammoths vanished from mainland Eurasia and North America around 10,000 years ago, but a small group of perhaps 500 to 1,000 animals became cut off on Wrangel Island and kept living. Radiocarbon dating of mammoth bones found on the island places their extinction at around 2000 BC, meaning they were alive during the Bronze Age civilizations of Sumer, Elam, and the Indus Valley, and during the time of ancient Egypt's fourth dynasty. That is roughly 6,000 years of extra survival beyond their mainland relatives.

  For a while, researchers assumed these survivors were a distinct insular dwarf variant, but further evaluation showed their body size, while relatively small, falls within the normal range for woolly mammoths in mainland Siberia. They were not true dwarves in the strict biological sense.

  Research published in 2017 suggested the final animals were experiencing a genetic meltdown: comparing their DNA with samples from about 40,000 years earlier revealed large numbers of detrimental genetic variants accumulating in the last population, a pattern consistent with the deterioration that affects any very small and isolated group. A later study published in 2024 complicated that picture, finding that many of the most harmful mutations had actually been purged from the genome. That study proposed that the extinction was likely caused by a sudden catastrophic event, and that the mammoths had already been gone for several centuries before the earliest humans arrived on the island.

• 3. First Footprints

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  The only known pre-modern archaeological site on Wrangel Island is called Chertov Ovrag, a Paleoeskimo short-term hunting camp on the southern coast dating to around 3,600 years ago. Excavators found the remains of at least 32 snow geese, six long-tailed ducks, one common murre, one snow bunting, two seals including one bearded seal, a walrus, and a polar bear, all in association with stone tools and a toggling harpoon head carved from walrus tusk. The stone tools share cultural similarities with other Paleoeskimo sites in Alaska.

  Among the Chukchi people of Siberia, a legend circulated about a chief named Krachai who led his people across the ice to a northern land. Retired University of Alaska Fairbanks linguistics professor Michael E. Krauss assembled archaeological, historical, and linguistic evidence suggesting Wrangel Island served as a waypoint on a trade route connecting an Inuit settlement at Point Hope, Alaska with the north Siberian coast. Krauss proposed that the migration in the Krachai legend was connected to Inuit settlers from North America who colonized that coast in late prehistoric and early historic times.

  A Cossack sergeant named Stepan Andreyev claimed in 1764 to have sighted the island, and his expedition's report noted that native accounts called it Tikegen and described it as inhabited by a people known as the Krahay.

• 4. Naming and the Search

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  Baron Ferdinand von Wrangel, a Baltic German explorer and Admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy, never set foot on the island that bears his name. He had read Andreyev's report and listened to Chukchi stories about land at the island's coordinates, and he set off on the Kolymskaya expedition of 1823 to 1824 to find it. He failed. Wrangel had noticed flocks of birds flying north and, by questioning the local population, concluded that an undiscovered island must exist somewhere in the Arctic Ocean. His search came up empty, and he eventually suggested that Andreyev may simply have sighted part of the Asian mainland.

  The island's formal naming came from American whaling captain Thomas Long, who approached within about fifteen miles in August 1867. Long published his account in The Honolulu Advertiser in November of that year, saying he chose to honor Wrangel as a tribute to a man who had spent three consecutive years north of latitude 68 degrees and demonstrated the reality of an open polar sea forty-five years earlier. Long's account appeared the following year in the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, under the title "The New Arctic Continent, or Wrangell's Land, discovered the 14th of August 1867, by Captain Long, of the American Ship Nile."

  British captain Henry Kellett had landed on Herald Island in 1849, and thought he saw another landmass to the west, which he called Plover Island. British admiralty charts subsequently labeled that phantom landmass Kellett Land, a ghost geography that shaped subsequent expeditions.

• 5. Disaster and Dispute

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  George W. De Long set out in 1879 commanding USS Jeannette on an expedition to the North Pole. He expected to navigate by the east side of "Kellett Land," which he believed stretched deep into the Arctic. His ship became locked in the polar ice pack, drifted westward and passed within sight of Wrangel, and was eventually crushed and sunk near the New Siberian Islands.

  A party from the USRC Corwin landed on Wrangel on the 12th of August 1881 and claimed it for the United States, renaming it New Columbia. That expedition was led by Captain Calvin L. Hooper and included the naturalist John Muir, who wrote the first published description of the island. Eleven days later, on the 23rd of August, USS Rodgers landed another party that spent about two weeks conducting a survey of the southern coast.

  Russian interest was asserted in 1911, when Boris Vilkitsky landed as part of the Russian Arctic Ocean Hydrographic Expedition. In 1916 the Tsarist government formally declared the island part of the Russian Empire.

  The most consequential challenge to Russian sovereignty came in 1921, when the Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson sent five settlers to Wrangel in a speculative attempt to claim it for Canada. The group consisted of the Canadian Allan Crawford, three Americans named Fred Maurer, Lorne Knight, and Milton Galle, and an Iñupiat woman named Ada Blackjack, who served as seamstress and cook. A relief ship failed to reach them in 1922 when the schooner Teddy Bear became locked in ice. By 1923, four of the five had died, and Ada Blackjack was the sole survivor when a rescue ship finally reached the island. That same ship deposited a new party of thirteen people, including an American named Charles Wells and twelve Inuit, one of whom had been born on the island during the first expedition.

• 6. Soviet Removal and Dark Rule

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  In 1924, the Soviet Union sent the vessel Krasny Oktyabr, meaning Red October, to remove the American and Inuit settlers who had been left behind. What followed was a diplomatic tangle. Charles Wells died of pneumonia in Vladivostok during a dispute between the American and Soviet governments about a boundary marker on the Siberian coast. One Inuit child died of tuberculosis. The remaining settlers were deported to the Chinese border post of Suifenhe, but China refused to accept them because an American consul in Harbin had indicated the Inuit were not American citizens. The American government eventually described the Inuit as "wards" of the United States but said no funds existed to bring them home. Another child died while they were detained in Manchuria. It took the American Red Cross providing $1,600 to finally secure their return, via a Japanese ship from Harbin to Victoria and Seattle before they reached Nome.

  In 1926, the Soviet government formally reaffirmed the Tsarist claim to the island and landed a team of explorers equipped with three years of supplies. Clear water during that landing gave way to years of heavy, unbroken ice, and attempts to reach the island by sea failed repeatedly. By 1929, the rescue icebreaker Fyodor Litke was dispatched, sailing from Sevastopol and pausing in Vladivostok on the 4th of July to swap its Black Sea crew for a local one. The ship fought through ice that allowed progress of only a few hundred meters a day, finally reaching the settlement on the 28th of August and departing with all the islanders on the 5th of September. The icebreaker received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour on the 20th of January 1930.

  The 1930s brought a darker chapter. According to a 1936 article in Time magazine, an appointed governor named Konstantin Semenchuk turned the island into a personal domain through extortion and murder. Semenchuk forbade the local Yupik Eskimos, who had been recruited from Provideniya Bay in 1926, from hunting walrus, threatening them with starvation while stockpiling food for himself. He was implicated in the deaths of opponents, including the local doctor. On the 27th of December 1934, his subordinate Stepan Startsev allegedly murdered a man named Nikolai Vulfson, who had tried to resist Semenchuk's authority. A trial at the Supreme Court of the RSFSR in May and June of 1936 sentenced both Semenchuk and Startsev to death for banditry. The prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky, called the two defendants "human waste." That trial launched Vyshinsky toward notoriety in the Moscow Trials that followed.

• 7. Wildlife and World Heritage

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  Wrangel Island has a higher density of polar bear dens than anywhere else on Earth, and the surrounding waters are feeding grounds for bearded and ringed seals, walrus, Arctic bowhead whales, migratory gray whales, and belugas. Lemmings on the island, specifically collared and west and east Siberian lemmings, are the primary food source for Arctic foxes, wolverines, and wolves. Wolves were spotted on the island again in 2002, having been present in ancient times before a long absence.

  Domestic reindeer were introduced in the 1950s, and their feral numbers are now managed at around 1,000 to limit damage to nesting bird grounds. Musk oxen were introduced in 1975, when 20 animals were brought in; that population has since grown to about 1,000.

  The island's plant life is extraordinary for its latitude. Its 417 plant species are double the count of any other Arctic tundra territory of comparable size, and more than any other Arctic island. BirdLife International has designated Wrangel and Herald Islands as an Important Bird Area. Breeding colonies include brant, cackling, greater white-fronted, Ross', and snow geese, snowy owls, and an array of gulls, jaegers, puffins, murres, and shorebirds. In 2014, a sandhill crane was observed on the island at what may be the furthest north such a sighting has ever been recorded.

  Resolution 189 of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR, adopted on the 23rd of March 1976, established the Wrangel Island State Nature Reserve. The protected marine zone was later extended to 12 nautical miles in 1997 and to 24 nautical miles in 1999. In 2004, Wrangel and Herald Islands were added to UNESCO's World Heritage List, making the reserve the northernmost World Heritage Site on Earth.