page_title: Severnaya Zemlya
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Severnaya Zemlya / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Taymyr Peninsula in an old map of the Yeniseysk Governorate
context_page_description: Severnaya Zemlya is a 37,000-square-kilometre archipelago in the Russian high Arctic. It lies off Siberia's Taymyr Peninsula, separated from the mainland by the Vilkitsky Strait. This archipelago separates two marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean, the Kara Sea in the west and the Laptev Sea in the east.
  Severnaya Zemlya was first noted in 1913 and first charted in 1930–32, making it the last sizeable archipelago on Earth to be explored. Administratively, the islands form part of Russia's Krasnoyarsk Krai federal subject. In Soviet times there were a number of research stations in different locations, but currently there are no human inhabitants in Severnaya Zemlya except for the Prima Polar Station near Cape Baranov.
  The largest glacier in the Russian Federation, the Academy of Sciences Glacier, is located in Severnaya Zemlya. The archipelago is notable as well in connection with the ongoing multiyear Arctic sea ice decline. Until recently, ice joined the islands to Eurasia, even at its smallest extent during the late summer melt season, blocking the Northeast Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
context_section_description: Although located not far off the northern coast of Russia, nested among Arctic ice-locked waters, the archipelago that is now known as Severnaya Zemlya was not formally recorded until the 20th century. Earlier explorers deemed that there was a land mass in the general area of the archipelago, such as in the report by Matvei Gedenschtrom and Yakov Sannikov made in 1810 at the time of their exploration of the New Siberian Islands.
  Later in the 19th century Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld during the Vega Expedition sailed very close to this land in 1878 but did not notice it. 
  In 1882, Danish Arctic explorer and naval officer Andreas Peter Hovgaard, leader of the Arctic survey Dijmphna Expedition, set himself the goal of discovering land north of Cape Chelyuskin and explore the unknown northeastern limits of the Kara Sea. However, Hovgaard was prevented from accomplishing his objectives after having become trapped in thick ice and his expedition was unable to reach even the Taymyr Peninsula's shores.
  Even at the end of the 19th century both Nansen's Fram expedition of 1895, as well as Eduard Toll's Russian polar expedition of 1900–02 on ship Zarya failed to note any traces of land to the north of the 55-kilometre-wide (34-mile) strait between the Kara Sea and the Laptev Sea that they navigated.
caption: ca 1902 map section of the Yeniseysk Governorate with empty ocean where the archipelago should be.
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