Europe’s eastern tip is a twin Arctic island once closed for war
Novaya Zemlya, Russian for 'new land', is a pair of long Arctic islands dividing the Barents Sea from the Kara Sea, and Cape Flissingsky on the northern one is usually counted as Europe's easternmost point. For decades the Soviet Union used the archipelago to test its biggest nuclear weapons.
The archipelago continues the northern Urals, and its interior is mountainous from end to end, topping out at 1,547 metres on the northern island. Severny, about 48,904 square kilometres, carries a large ice cap and many active glaciers, while Yuzhny, about 33,275 square kilometres, is mostly bare tundra; the narrow Matochkin Strait separates them, and together with smaller islands they total roughly 83,000 square kilometres. Its heavily indented coast holds more fjords than any other part of Russia.
Novgorod hunters knew the islands in the eleventh century. Hugh Willoughby became the first Western European visitor in 1553, and Willem Barentsz rounded the northern cape in 1596 and wintered on the northeast coast, dying on that expedition. A seventeenth-century ship's surgeon described local people he called Zembliens who worshipped the sun and wooden idols. Russia resettled Nenets families at Malye Karmakuly in the 1870s, and between 50 and 300 Nenets lived by fishing, trapping, herding reindeer and hunting seals and polar bears until every civilian was moved to the mainland in 1957.
During the Second World War, ships from the scattered convoy PQ 17 sought shelter in the Matochkin Strait in July 1942, and in 1943 German U-boats briefly ran a secret seaplane base here.
From 1954 the islands became a Soviet nuclear test ground covering more than half the land. On 30 October 1961 the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful weapon ever exploded, detonated over Sukhoy Nos. In all, 224 blasts released about 265 megatons, compared with roughly two megatons for every explosive used in the Second World War. An underground test on 12 September 1973 registered magnitude 6.97 and triggered an 80-million-tonne avalanche. The last Soviet test came in 1990, and the 2010 census found about 2,429 residents, mostly military and construction workers in Belushya Guba and Rogachevo.
Source: Novaya Zemlya
