Kotelny/Faddeyevsky Island

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Kotelny Island (Russian: Остров Котельный) and Faddeyevsky Island (О. Фаддеевский) are mapped as separate islands in the New Siberian Islands group of the eastern Russian Arctic. A flat, low-lying, sandy plain is mapped as Bunge Land (Бунге Земля), It connects Faddeyevsky and Kotelny islands and ties them together into a single geographical island, one of the 50 largest islands in the world (anonymous 1911).

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia gives the following areas:

Kotelny Island       11,665 km²
Bunge Land            6,200 km²
Faddeyevsky Island    5,300 km²
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TOTAL                23,165 km²

Kotelny Island is rocky and hilly, rising to 374 m on Mt. Malakatyn-Tas. Faddeyevsky Island is relatively flat as it only to 65 m in elevation. It is named after a fur trader called Faddeyev who built the first habitation there. Bunge Land lies mainly between 2 to 12 m above sea level and is flooded during storm surges. In the southeast a very small area of it lies at an elevation of 11 to 21 m above sea level. It is named after Russian zoologist and explorer A. A. Bunge

Kotelny Island consists of sedimentary rocks and sediments ranging in age from Early Paleozoic to Late Cenozoic. The oldest rocks fossiliferous shallow- to deep-water marine, Ordovician to Early Devonian limestones and dolomites. Middle Devonian to Carboniferous interbedded limestones, dolomites, sandstones, and conglomerates overlie these sedimentary strata. The Permian to Jurassic strata exposed within Kotelny Island consist of interbedded, fossiliferous mudstones, siltstones, and sandstones. All of these sedimentary rocks are faulted, folded into complex anticlines and synclines, and intruded by thin diabase dikes (Fujita and Cook 1990, Kos’ko et al. 1990).

Within Bunge Land and the southwest corner of Kotelny Island, relatively unconsolidated sediments ranging in age from Early Cretaceous to Pleistocene overlie the above folded and faulted sedimentary rocks. The oldest of these sediments are Early Cretaceous alluvial clays, silts, and sands that contain layers of conglomerate, tuff, tuffaceous sandstone, coal, and, at top, rhyolite. The Late Cretaceous sediments are overlain by Late Eocene to Pliocene alluvial sands that contain layers of clay, silt, gravel, brown coal, and lignitized wood. Pleistocene alluvial deposits underlie terraces that lie within the Balyktakh and Dragotsennaya River valleys. Thick permafrost has developed in these sediments (Kos’ko and Trufanov 2002, Makeyev et al. 2003).

Faddeyevsky Island and Bunge Land is underlain by unconsolidated sediments ranging in age from Early Cretaceous to Pleistocene. Three very small and isolated exposures indicate that the Early Cretaceous strata are similar to those found in the southwest corner of Kotelny Island. Overlying the Early Cretaceous sediments are alluvial and lacustrine Eocene clays and silts that contains rare beds of sands, brown coal, and gravel. To the north these sediments grade laterally into nearshore marine clays with fossil pelecypods. The Eocene sediments are overlain by fossiliferous, terrestrial and marine Oligocene to Miocene sands that contain subordinate beds of mud, clay, gravel, and brown coal. The Oligocene-Miocene sands accumulated in alluvial, lacustrine, and nearshore marine environments. Overlying the Oligocene-Miocene sands are Pliocene alluvial, lacustrine, and nearshore marine, muds, silts, and sands (Kos’ko and Trufanov 2002).

Pleistocene deposits blanket most of the surface of Faddeyevsky Island and Bunge Land. A layer of Late Pleistocene and Holocene alluvial and lacustrine deposits largely cover the central and southern parts of Faddeyevsky Island. Middle and Late Pleistocene deposits largely cover the northern part of this island. The permafrost is about 400 to 500 m thick. The central plain of Faddeyevsky Island has been highly altered by thermokarst processes. It contains numerous deep erosive cuts created by the seasonal melting of the permafrost. Numerous baydzharakhs, thermokarst mounds, dot landscape, They are the result of the melting of polygonal ice wedges within the permafrost (Andreev et al. 2001).

Rush/grass, forb, cryptogam tundra covers all of Faddeyevsky Island and most of Kotelny Island. It is tundra consisting mostly of very low-growing grasses, rushes, forbs, mosses, lichens, and liverworts. These plants either mostly or completely cover the surface of the ground. The soils are typically moist, fine-grained, and often hummocky (CAVM Team 2003).

Prostrate dwarfshrub, herb tundra covers all of Bunge Land and the eastern part of Kotelny Island adjacent to it. This type of tundra consists of dry tundra with open to patchy (20-80% cover) vegetation. The dominant plants comprising prostrate dwarfshrub, herb tundra are shrubs, i.e. Dryas spp. and Salix arctica, less than 5 cm tall, graminoids, and forbs. Lichens are also common (CAVM Team 2003).

[edit] Adjacent islands

Deep inside the bay on the northern side of Kotelny lies Skrytyy Island (Ostrov Skrytyy) 75.667° N 140.833° E. It is 11 Km long and 5.5 km wide.
Very close to Bunge Land's northwestern coast there are two islands: Zheleznyakov Island (Ostrov Zheleznyakova), right off the NW cape and, east of it, Matar Island (Ostrov Matar). Both islands are about 5 km in length.
Nanosnyy Island 76.283° N 140.416° E is a small island located due north off the northern bay formed by Kotelny and Bunge. It is C-shaped and only 4 km in length, but its importance lies in the fact that it is the northernmost island of the New Siberian group.

[edit] History

The island was discovered by the industrialist Ivan Lyakhov in 1773. Formerly this island had been known as "Thaddeus Island" or "Thaddeus Islands" in some maps.

In 1808-1810 Yakov Sannikov and Matvei Gedenschtrom went to The New Siberian Islands on a cartographic expedition. Yakov Sannikov reported the sighting of a "new land" north of Kotelny in 1811. This became the myth of Zemlya Sannikova or "Sannikov Land".

In 1886 Baron Eduard Von Toll thought that he had seen an unknown land north of Kotelny. He guessed that this was the so-called "Zemlya Sannikova".

[edit] References

Andreev, A.A., G. Grosse, L. Schirrmeister, S.A. Kuzmina, E. Y. Novenko, A.A. Bobrov, P.E. Tarasov, B.P. Ilyashuk, T.V. Kuznetsova, M. Krbetschek, H. Meyer, and V.V. Kunitsky, 2004, Late Saalian and Eemian palaeoenvironmental history of the Bol’shoy Lyakhovsky Island (Laptev Sea region, Arctic Siberia). Boreas. vol. 33, pp. 319–348.
anonymous, 1911, New Siberia Archipelago
CAVM Team, 2003, [Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Map]. Scale 1:7,500,000. Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF) Map No. 1. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Anchorage, Alaska
Fujita, K., and D.B. Cook, 1990, The Arctic continental margin of eastern Siberia, in A. Grantz, L. Johnson, and J. F. Sweeney, eds., pp. 289-304, The Arctic Ocean Region. Geology of North America, vol L, Geological Society of America, Boulder, Colorado.
Kos’ko, M.K., and G.V. Trufanov, 2002, Middle Cretaceous to Eopleistocene Sequences on the New Siberian Islands: an approach to interpret offshore seismic. Marine and Petroleum Geology. vol. 19, no. 7, pp. 901–919.
Kos’ko, M.K., B.G. Lopatin, and V.G. Ganelin, 1990, Major geological features of the islands of the East Siberian and Chukchi Seas and the Northern Coast of Chukotka. Marine Geology. vol. 93, pp. 349–367.
Makeyev, V.M., D.P. Ponomareva, V.V. Pitulko, G.M. Chernova and D.V. Solovyeva, 2003, Vegetation and Climate of the New Siberian Islands for the past 15,000 Years. Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 56-66.