Siberia’s eastern great river is Russia’s longest entirely domestic run
The Lena runs 4,294 kilometres from the Baikal Mountains to the Arctic—eleventh-longest on Earth and the longest river wholly inside Russia. With the Ob and Yenisey it forms Siberia’s trio of Arctic giants, draining about 2,490,000 square kilometres.
Its name probably comes from the Even-Evenk Elyu-Ene, the Large River. The source sits 1,640 metres up, only seven kilometres west of Lake Baikal. Flowing northeast across the Lena-Angara Plateau, it gathers the Kirenga, Vitim, and Olyokma before the Yakutian lowland and a vast delta. Farther down, the Aldan, fed by the long-curving Amga, joins from the east. Mean annual discharge reaches 489 cubic kilometres. Navigation covers 3,540 kilometres, but ice-free seasons last only about seventy days near the estuary and 125 days upstream.
Gold washes from Vitim and Olyokma sands; mammoth tusks turn up in delta ground. Folklore credits Demid Pyanda’s fur party with finding the river around 1620–1623 and exploring some 2,400 kilometres. Lakes Nedzheli and Ulakhan-Kyuel rank among the basin’s largest floodplain waters. In 1912 troops shot striking gold miners and townspeople near Bodaybo, and Kerensky’s report of the Lena massacre to the Duma helped fuel revolutionary feeling. Vladimir Ulyanov, exiled in Siberia, may even have borrowed his alias Lenin from the river.
At its mouth a delta pushes about 100 kilometres into the Laptev Sea and spreads some 400 kilometres wide. For roughly seven months it is frozen tundra, but from May it turns into lush wetland for a short season. Among its countless flat islands, Arga Muora Sise ranks as the 99th-largest island in the world.
Two parties from the doomed Jeannette expedition reached the delta in September 1881: native Tungus hunters rescued engineer George Melville’s group, while only two of Captain George De Long’s men survived. In 1885 Baron Eduard von Toll and Alexander von Bunge explored the delta and the New Siberian Islands for the Imperial Academy of Sciences.
Source: Lena River
