Earth’s largest country subdivision freezes past Verkhoyansk records
Sakha (Yakutia) is Russia’s largest federal subject and the world’s biggest country subdivision, holding about a million people along the Arctic Ocean in the Far East. Verkhoyansk and Oymyakon log Northern Hemisphere cold extremes second only to Greenland’s Summit Camp.
It covers 3,083,523 square kilometres, half the Far Eastern Federal District, and became the world’s largest subnational unit after Nunavut split from Canada’s Northwest Territories in 1999, a little smaller than India. It reaches Henrietta Island in the far north and includes the New Siberian Islands, and the Laptev and East Siberian seas off its coast freeze for nine to ten months each year. It is the only Russian region spanning three time zones.
Evenks, Yukaghirs, and other Tungusic and Paleosiberian peoples hunted and herded before Turkic Sakha migrants arrived from the Baikal area. The Turkic Sakha reached the middle Lena between the ninth and sixteenth centuries, probably in waves, bringing Inner Asian herding. Seventeenth-century Russians folded Yakutsk Oblast into the Tsardom for fur tribute. Sakha numbers dropped by 70 percent after the conquest, but Yakuts later spread along the Vilyuy, and the region saw some of the Civil War’s final battles before becoming the Yakut ASSR in 1922. On 27 September 1990 it became the Yakutskaya-Sakha SSR; on 27 December 1991 the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia).
Yakutsk, the capital, is the coldest major city on Earth, with winter averages often below −35 °C, yet summers are warm. All of the republic sits on permafrost, about 40 percent lies above the Arctic Circle, and taiga dominated by larch covers some 47 percent. The navigable Lena runs 4,400 kilometres, and Pleistocene Park is trying to restore ice-age grasslands by reintroducing grazing animals.
The name Yakut comes from an Evenk word for the Sakha, and the Dolgans pronounce Sakha as Haka.
Source: Sakha Republic
