Geiberg Islands

The Geiberg Islands, also spelt Geyberg, Gejberg or Heiberg (Russian: Гейберга Острова ; Geyberga Ostrova or also острова Акселя Гейберга) is a group of four small islands covered with tundra vegetation and with scattered stones on their shores. They lie in the Kara Sea, between the bleak coast of Siberia's Taymyr Peninsula and Severnaya Zemlya. These islands are between 35 and 45 Km from the continental shore.

The Geiberg Islands are covering the entrance to the Vilkitsky Strait from the east.The latitude of this group is 77° 40' N and the longitude 101° 27' E. The largest island of the group is only about 5 Km in length.

The sea surrounding the Gejberg Islands is covered with fast ice in the winter, which is long and bitter, and the climate is severe. The surrounding sea is obstructed by pack ice even in the summer, so that these islands are connected with the mainland for most of the year.

The Geiberg Islands were named by Fridtjof Nansen after Consul Axel Heiberg, manager of the Norwegian Ringnes brewery, who was the main financier of the "Fram" expedition to the Arctic. There is an island in the Canadian Arctic Territories named after Axel Heiberg that should not be confused with these islands.

This island group belongs to the Krasnoyarsk Krai administrative division of the Russian Federation. It is also part of the Great Arctic State Nature Reserve, the largest nature reserve of Russia.

History

A Soviet polar meteorological station was established on Geiberg in 1940 to aid navigation of the Northern Sea Route.After the breakup of the USSR, commercial navigation in the Arctic went into decline. More or less regular shipping is presently to be found only from Murmansk to Dudinka in the west and between Vladivostok and Pevek in the east. The areas around the Taymyr Peninsula, including the Vilkitsky Strait, see next to no shipping at all.

The polar station on the Geiberg Islands is now abandoned, with millions of rubles of equipment still there.

Adjacent islands

*Closer to the coast there is a 3 km long island called Ostrov Gellanda-Gansena. Usually this island is not considered part of the Geiberg group, but it lies quite close to it, at only 28 km ESE of Vostochnyy Island. This single island was named after Norwegian pioneer of modern oceanography Bjorn Helland-Hansen (b. 1877 in Oslo, d. 1957 in Bergen).

*Further south lie two islands close to the coast. Povorotnyy is the larger one close to the shore. The smaller one further offshore is called Vecherniy.

References

*Polar Station: [http://oopt.info/barctic/science.html] .
*Nature Reserve: http://www.bigarctic.ru/Eng
*A first-person account of the Taymyr's voyage in 1938, including a bear hunt and snow blindness on Geiberg Islands: [http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/papanin_id/03.html] .
*Account of a ski expedition in 1994: [http://old.intertat.ru/index.php?cat=r&bigoffset=0&microoffset=0&id=45327] .
*Description of sightings of wolves and other wild animals on Geiberg. [http://www.ecosystema.ru/07referats/zapov_ark.htm]
*Professor Helland-Hansen: [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B6rn_Helland-Hansen (in German)]

ee also

*Kara Sea
*Severnaya Zemlya