Kotelny/Faddeyevsky Island

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Kotelny Island (Russian: Остров Котельный) and Faddeyevsky Island (О. Фаддеевский) formed as separate islands in the New Siberian Islands group of the eastern Russian Arctic. Over the millennia a sandy accretion, which has been designated as Bunge Land (Бунге Земля), has built up between them forming a single geographical island, one of the 50 largest islands in the world.

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 mainly clay and sand, rising only to 65 m. It is named after a fur trader called Faddeyev who built the first habitation there. Bunge Land is mainly less than 8 m above sea level and is sometimes flooded. It is named after Russian zoologist and explorer A. A. Bunge.

[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".