Russian Expedition Discovers New Island, Strait In Franz Josef Land Archipelago

A new geographic discovery has been claimed in the Arctic as the expedition of the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet said on Thursday that it had discovered a new island and a new strait in an area that was previously believed to be a continuous land in Russia's Franz Josef Land archipelago in the Arctic Ocean

MURMANSK (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 12th September, 2019) A new geographic discovery has been claimed in the Arctic as the expedition of the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet said on Thursday that it had discovered a new island and a new strait in an area that was previously believed to be a continuous land in Russia's Franz Josef Land archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.

In August, the Northern Fleet said that its expedition had discovered five islands, which could be seen from space, with areas ranging from 0.5 to 33 square miles in the Franz Josef Land archipelago.

"On September 10, 2019, the hydrographical team of the Integrated expedition confirmed and registered this fact on the nautical charts. The [Northern Fleet expedition] has passed through the newly-emerged strait from the Surovaya Bay to the Gulf of Hydrographs, performed depth measurements, and measured the direction and speed of its current," the spokesman for the Northern Fleet, Vadim Serga, told journalists.

He added that the newly discovered island of Littrow was long believed to be a peninsula of a larger island, called the Hall Island.

"After 145 years since the first human has come to this land, the military of the Northern Fleet and scientists of the Russia Geographical Society have earnestly proved the existence of about a 500-meter-wide [1,640 feet] strait and the island of Littrow [with an area of] about 200 square kilometers [77 square miles]," Serga stated.

The Littrow cape was first discovered in March 1874 by Austro-Hungarian arctic explorer Julius von Payer and named after Austrian astronomer Joseph Johann von Littrow, who was the first astronomy professor of Russia's Kazan University and later established an observatory there.