Islands of the Russian Arctic
The islands of the Russian Arctic
are located within a vast region, wholly located within the Arctic Circle, stretching from the Arctic
coast of European Russia in the west and along the northern coasts of central and far-eastern Siberia
in the east — from the Barents Sea to the Chukchi Sea.
Much of the continental shelf in this region comprises the broad expanse of the Siberian Shelf — the widest on Earth — that extends northwards for up to 1,500 km. It contains several extremely shallow seas: the Barents, Pechora, Kara, Laptev, East Siberian, and Chukchi seas with average depths of around 100 m. Their waters contain large volumes of freshwater — water that is received from some of the earths largest rivers, such as the Yenisey, Ob, Irtysh and Lena. Their low salinities and high latitudes mean that these arctic marginal seas are often the first to freeze as winter approaches and can remain frozen deep in to the brief Arctic summer — particularly in the east.
Emerging from these shallow arctic seas are a four large groups of islands: the Franz Josef Land archipelago (16,134 km²), Severnaya Zemlya (38,800 km²), Novaya Zemlya (90,650 km²) and the New Siberian Islands (29,000 km²). In addition, there are a few large solitary islands such as Wrangel Island (7,608 km²), Vaygach (3,398 km²) and Kolguyev (3,497 km²). Not imaged in the atlas are the isolated islands of Ushakova (266 km²) and Vise (217 km²) — located in the high central Arctic regions between Franz Josef Land and Severnaya Zemlya. There are also numerous small islands and island groups located just off the mainland coast, especially in the region of the Ob-Yenisey estuaries and along the coast of the Taymyr Peninsula.
Many of the larger islands are extensively glaciated and contain large, dome-shaped ice caps. Komsomolets Island, in the Severnaya Zemlya group, contains the largest ice cap of the Russian Arctic region where the Academy of Sciences Ice Cap covers over five thousand square kilometers of the island in an ice dome of over 800 m thickness. Of the major island groups, the New Siberian Islands are the exception in that they have no glacial cover.
NOTE: Due to extensive snow, ice and cloud cover many of the islands in this region have no available images and so have been omitted.