Wrangel Island (Russian: Остров Врангеля Ostrov Vrangelya) is an island in the Arctic Ocean, between the Chukchi and East Siberian Seas, and belonging to the Russian Federation. Wrangel Island lies across the 180° meridian. The International date line is displaced eastwards at this latitude to avoid the island as well as Chukotka on the Russian mainland.
Conditions
Rocky, barren and frozen, the island has a weather station and a single permanent settlement. The island is a breeding ground for polar bears, seals and lemmings. During the summer it is visited by many types of birds.
History
The island is named for Baron Ferdinand Petrovich Wrangel who, after hearing of stories of an island at Wrangel Island's coordinates from some Chukchi, set off on an expedition (1820-1824) to discover the island, with no success.
Thomas Long, an American whaling captain, finally discovered it and named it after Baron Wrangel.
In 1911, a group of Russians made a landing on the island and in 1914, the survivors of the ill-equipped Canadian Arctic Expedition, organised by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, were marooned there for nine months after their ship, the Karluk, was crushed in the ice pack. The survivors were rescued after Captain Robert Bartlett walked to Siberia to summon help.
Undeterred, in 1921, Vilhjalmur Stefansson returned with a small party of Inuit settlers in a speculative attempt to claim the island for Canada. In 1926 the Soviet Union ejected the survivors of Stefansson's Inuit squatters and established the settlement that survives to this day on the island.
The Soviet government also used the island for a gulag labour camp.
During the last ice age, it is thought that large numbers of mammoths lived on Wrangel Island. It has been shown that mammoths survived on Wrangel Island until 1700 B.C. However, due to limited food supply, they were much smaller than the typical mammoth.
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