Today we will talk about the land of Wrangel. This island is very interesting. It was unsuccessfully searched for by a Russian traveler, but was discovered by a British and a German. Then the deserted island became an "apple of discord" between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. This land is surrounded by legends. There is even an opinion that one of the colonies of the sinister Gulag was located here. But even without repressive camps, this land was deadly for a person. Not one polar explorer died here. And today the island continues to amaze scientists with new sensational discoveries. How the island was formed, what is the relief, climate, flora and fauna - read in this article.
Wrangel Island on the map
This is a fairly large piece of land. Its area is approximately seven and a half thousand square kilometers, and most of it is occupied by mountains. The island itself is located in the Arcticocean. Even in the simple geographical location of Wrangel's land, its uniqueness is already hidden. It is a watershed between two large areas of the ocean, a natural boundary between the Chukchi and East Siberian seas. And on Wrangel Island there is a junction between the Eastern and Western hemispheres of our planet. The one hundred and eightieth meridian, the so-called "date line", divides the land into almost equal parts. The island is separated from the northern coast of Chukotka by at least 140 kilometers of water - the Long Strait. Since 1976, this land has been declared a nature reserve. The last permanent resident died in 2003. Since then, only polar explorers have lived here. Administratively, the island belongs to the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug (Iultinsky District).
Discovery history
We can say with confidence that the Wrangel land was the first to be discovered by paleo-Eskimos. As archaeological excavations carried out in the ravine called Chertov prove, people stopped here for camps three and a half thousand years ago. The Russian pioneers were told about the existence of the distant land of Umkilir (“the island of polar bears”) of the Chukchi. But two hundred years passed before the foot of a European set foot on a deserted and unkind shore. For a long time, the island was considered just a beautiful Chukchi legend. In 1820-1824, the Russian navigator and statesman Ferdinand Petrovich Wrangel unsuccessfully searched for him. In 1849, British explorer and traveler Henry Kellett observed two pieces of land in the Chukchi Sea through a telescope. The discoverer named them after himself and his ship Herald. This is how Kellett Land and Herald Island (later Wrangel Island) appeared on the world map. But this is not all the adventures of our part of the land surrounded by the sea.
Why the discovery was named after Wrangel
The island was considered unknown to Europeans (the opinion of the Chukchi about Umkilir was not taken into account). The right of the discoverer belonged to the one who not only saw the distant shore with the help of a telescope, but stepped on it with his foot. It was the German merchant Eduard Dallmann, who carried out merchant operations with the inhabitants of Chukotka and Alaska. But he was far from thinking of somehow calling the lands he visited. A year later, in 1867, American whaler Thomas Long landed on the island. By vocation, this brave man was a researcher, he knew a lot about the search for F. P. Wrangel. Therefore, he named the island he discovered in his honor. The territory was a no man's land for about 14 years. In 1881, an American ship approached the Harold and Wrangel Islands. It was looking for members of De Long's polar expedition, which went missing to conquer the North Pole in 1879 on the Jeanette ship. Captain Calvin Hooper landed part of the crew on the island. While the sailors were looking for traces of the missing, the captain hoisted the US flag on the shore. He named the island New Columbia.
Formation of the archipelago
Until the 20th century, the governments of Russia and the United States were little interested in who owns the two patches of land lost in the Arctic Ocean. This attitude was facilitated by their "distant" geographiccoordinates. Wrangel Island, for example, is the westernmost island in a small archipelago, located between 70° and 71° north latitude. The length along the meridian at this place is simply unique: from 179 ° W. up to 177 ° in. e. The archipelago is located very close not only to North America, but also to Asia. This is all that remains of the once existing bridge between the two continents, when the Bering Strait had not yet separated them. Thus, these are islands of mainland origin. That is why they are also called Beringia. This area was spared by ice ages, and during global warming, the islands did not go under water. This circumstance has preserved an amazing flora and fauna on the land of Wrangel.
Arctic apple of discord
With the advent of the twentieth century, and along with the century of industry, both applicants have claimed their rights to the archipelago. After all, it does not matter where Wrangel Island is located, whether someone lives there and whether it is possible to carry out economic activities. The borders of adjacent states are shifted to the east or west, respectively, if someone takes possession of the archipelago. In the autumn of 1911, a Russian hydrographic expedition aboard the Vaigach ship landed on Wrangel Island and hoisted the Russian flag on it. And in the summer of 1913, the Canadian brigantine Karluk was caught in ice and forced to drift towards the Bering Strait. Part of the team landed on Herald Island, and the other - a large party - on Wrangel. Two members of this expedition reached the mainland (Alaska), but the rescue expedition came to those in distressonly in September 1914.
Development of the archipelago
In 1921, the Canadians decided to stake out an archipelago in the Chukchi Sea. After all, this gave the state the opportunity to fish and whaling off their coasts. But the first settlers, consisting of four polar explorers and one Eskimo woman, did not survive the winter (only Ada Blackjack survived). Then the Canadians in 1923 formed a second colony. The geologist C. Wells and twelve Eskimos, among them women and children, came to Wrangel Island. Since professional hunters were engaged in the extraction of food, the colonists successfully survived the winter. But the government of the USSR sent the Krasny Oktyabr icebreaker equipped with guns to the shores of the island. His team forcibly took the settlers on board and took them to Vladivostok, from where they later extradited them to their homeland. As a result of such a trip, two children died.
Wrangel Island is ours
How did he finally become "domestic"? Although the Wrangel Islands appeared on the map of Russia, the government did not calm down until Russian colonists established themselves there. In 1926, a polar station was founded, led by researcher G. Ya. Ushakov. Together with him, another 59 Chukchi from the villages of Chaplino and Providence settled. In 1928, the Ukrainian journalist Nikolai Trublaini came there on the icebreaker Litke. He repeatedly described Wrangel Island and its harsh beauty in his books (in particular, “The Way to the Arctic through the Tropics”). Collective farms were supposed to be everywhere in the Land of Soviets, and the Far North was no exception. In 1948In the same year, a reindeer herding collective farm was founded - for this purpose a small herd was brought from the mainland. And in the 70s, musk oxen were introduced from Nunivak Island. Although evil tongues claim that one of the Gulag camps was based on the archipelago, this is not true. The settlements of Ushakovskoye, Perkatkun, Zvezdny and the village. Cape Schmidt was inhabited either by polar explorers or by Chukchi tribes.
Reserved land
Back in 1953, the authorities decided to protect walruses and their rookeries on two islands in the Chukchi Sea. Seven years later, the Regional Executive Committee of Magadan, by its resolution, created a reserve on Wrangel Island. Later (1968) he was upgraded in status. But the Soviet government did not stop there either. The reserve of national importance in 1976 was transformed into the natural reserve "Wrangel Islands". The zone is still protected in accordance with the resolution of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR under No. 189 of March 23, 1976. The plural in the name of the reserve is not a typo. The neighboring island of Herald, as well as about 1,430,000 hectares of water area, also came under protection. Ironically, the crisis of the late 1990s greatly contributed to the conservation of nature. Most of the inhabitants were taken to the mainland, since there were no means to supply them with fuel and food. The last inhabitant of Vasilina Alpaun was killed by a polar bear in 2003. And in 2004, both islands were included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Relief
The map of Wrangel Island shows that this piece of land is quite mountainous. Three almost parallel chains - North, Middle and Southridges - cut off by coastal cliffs. The highest point - Mount Sovetskaya - reaches 1096 meters above sea level. It is located almost in the center of the island. The low Northern Range turns into a swampy plain called the Tundra of the Academy. The low-lying shores of the island are dissected by lagoons. There are many lakes and rivers here. But there are no fish in them. Due to the harsh climate, these reservoirs freeze through in winter. However, global warming is noticeable here as well. In recent years, shoals of pink salmon began to actively enter the mouths of the rivers for spawning. The rugged terrain and polar location have created a number of non-melting glaciers on the island.
Climate of Wrangel Island
Polar night here comes in the second decade of November, and the long-awaited sun is shown at the end of January. The luminary does not set beyond the horizon from mid-May to the third decade of July. But even the fact that the sun constantly illuminates Wrangel Island does not add warmth to the local summer. The temperature even in July does not exceed +3 °C. Frequent snowfalls, drizzle and fog. Only in the abnormally hot summer of 2007 did the thermometer jump up to +14.8 °C (in August). Winters are very frosty, with frequent snowstorms. February and March are especially fierce. The temperature during this period does not rise above -30 ° C for many weeks. Cold air masses from the Arctic carry little moisture with them. But in the summer, moist winds blow from the North Pacific.
Flora
B. N. Gorodkov, who in 1938 studied the vegetation cover on the eastern coast of Wrangel Land, the islanderroneously attributed to the zone of the Arctic deserts. Further study of the flora led scientists to the idea that its territory lies in the polar tundra belt. And to be very precise, the classification is as follows: the Wrangel subprovince of the Western American zone of the Arctic tundra. The flora is distinguished by its ancient species composition. Three percent of the plants are subendemic. These are poppy Gorodkov, beskilnitsa, Wrangel's ostrich and others. At present, it has been revealed that Wrangel Island has no equal in the polar zone in terms of the number of endemics. In addition to these plants, which are found only here and nowhere else in the world, more than a hundred rare species grow in the reserve.
Fauna
Severe climatic conditions do not favor special species diversity. There are absolutely no amphibians, reptiles and freshwater fish on the island. But Wrangel Island, the photo of which is unlikely to do without a white bear in the foreground, holds the record for the density of these animals. Judge for yourself: on an area of about seven and a half thousand square kilometers, four hundred she-bears coexist. And that's not counting males and cubs! This justifies the Chukchi name of the island - Umkilir. Moreover, the population of this animal is increasing year by year. The polar bear is the main owner of the island. In addition to it, there are introduced reindeer and musk ox. In summer, bumblebees, butterflies, mosquitoes and flies are blown in from the mainland. The world of birds has about 40 species on the island. Of the rodents, Vinogradov's lemming is endemic. In addition to bears, there are other predators: polar fox, wolf, fox, wolverine, ermine. The local walrus rookery is the largest in Russia.
Unique discovery
In the mid-1990s, the Wrangel Island Nature Reserve appeared on the front pages of scientific journals. And all because the remains of mammoths were discovered here by paleontologists. But it was not the discovery itself that was important, but its age. It turned out that on the island these elephants, overgrown with thick hair, lived and were he althy three and a half thousand years ago. But it is known that mammoths became extinct more than ten thousand years ago. What happens? When the Crete-Mycenaean civilization flourished in Greece, and Pharaoh Tutankhamen reigned in Egypt, a living mammoth walked around Wrangel Island! True, the local subspecies was also distinguished by its small growth - the size of a modern African elephant.
