Originally published 2019-11-10.
In 2019 Russia's Northern Fleet confirmed that five small islands had emerged in Vize Bay, on the northern island of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Russian Arctic. They had been hidden under the edge of a glacier; as the ice pulled back, the rock beneath it became islands in their own right. The islands were first spotted on satellite images in 2016 and surveyed on the ground during a naval expedition in the summer of 2019.
They are not new land in a geological sense. They are old rock that was buried by ice and is now exposed, which makes them a clear, map-changing sign of how fast Arctic glaciers are retreating.
Where Novaya Zemlya is
Novaya Zemlya ("New Land" in Russian) is a long, curved archipelago in the far north-east of Europe, separating the Barents Sea to the west from the Kara Sea to the east. It is made up of two main islands, Severny (northern) and Yuzhny (southern), split by the narrow Matochkin Strait, and covers roughly 83,000 square kilometres.
The Novaya Zemlya archipelago. (Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Rapid Response Team/Goddard Space Flight Centre)
The northern island carries a large ice cap that feeds many glaciers flowing down to the sea, while the southern island is largely free of ice. The archipelago is best known for its Cold War past: it was the Soviet Union's main Arctic nuclear test site, and in October 1961 it hosted the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. Today only a few thousand people live there, most in the military settlement of Belushya Guba.
How the islands were found
The discovery began on a screen rather than on a ship. In 2016, Marina Migunova, a student engineer, noticed unfamiliar patches of land in satellite imagery of Vize Bay while working on a research paper. The features appeared where maps showed the front of the Vylki glacier, also known as the Nansen glacier.
Some reports trace the first observations to a 2015–2016 survey by the hydrographic vessel Vizir. Either way, the islands are believed to have emerged from the ice around 2014, and the Russian Ministry of Defence announced them in August 2019.
That summer, a Northern Fleet expedition that travelled as far north as Franz Josef Land, aboard ships including the hydrographic vessel Altai, landed teams to survey the islands' outlines and terrain. In October 2019, at a press conference marking the end of the voyage, Vice Admiral Alexander Moiseyev said melting and changing ice had uncovered the land.
How big are they, and will they last?
The five islands vary a lot. The smallest is a speck of roughly 30 by 30 metres, about 900 square metres. The largest covers around 54,500 square metres, a little more than seven football pitches.
Nobody knows how long they will survive. Captain First Class Alexei Kornis, head of the Northern Fleet's hydrographic service, said it was too early to judge, and a glaciologist on the expedition reportedly suggested they might last a decade or less. Ground that has been pressed down and shaped by ice can become unstable once that weight disappears, and waves, sea ice and frost can wear small islands away quickly.
Life arrives fast all the same. Expedition members reported algae, plants and birds on the islands, and signs of larger animals, including the remains of a seal apparently killed by a polar bear.
A sixth island, and dozens more across the Arctic
The same voyage turned up a sixth previously unknown landmass in Franz Josef Land, further north. It sits in a newly formed strait and had been mistaken for part of an existing peninsula until retreating ice revealed water between them.
Melting glaciers reveal five new islands in the Arctic https://t.co/rF7P07JBs5
— The Guardian (@guardian) October 22, 2019
These finds are part of a wider pattern. According to the Russian navy, at least a dozen new islands have appeared in its Arctic waters in recent years, and Russian hydrographers have recorded more than 30 new islands, capes and bays in Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya as glaciers retreat. In 2015 the survey ship Senezh alone charted nine new islands off the western coast of Severny. Russian media have even reported schoolchildren spotting new islands while studying satellite images.
Why it matters
The Arctic is warming much faster than the planet as a whole, with parts of the region several degrees warmer than in the past. Bangor University oceanographer Tom Rippeth told reporters at the time that glacier retreat exposing new land is a symptom of that warming.
New islands are a vivid way to see change that usually happens out of sight. They also have practical effects: nautical charts need updating, and in Russia's Arctic newly exposed land can extend claims to surrounding waters. At the same time, the retreat of sea ice is opening the Northern Sea Route to more shipping and making mining projects on Novaya Zemlya, such as the Pavlovskoye lead and zinc deposit, easier to develop.
A common misunderstanding is that melting ice somehow "creates" land. It does not. What changes is the line between ice and open water. Satellites first flag the change, and survey crews then confirm it and measure what has appeared.
The bigger picture
The Vize Bay islands are small, remote and may be short-lived, but they mark a real shift on the map. The short video below, shared by the news channel TicToc, reported on the find.
Sources: ScienceAlert (Peter Dockrill, October 2019); GeoGarage / The Maritime Executive (August 2019); Wikipedia: Novaya Zemlya; map image: NASA Earth Observatory.
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