Wrangel Island in Siberia, Russia

Location
Wrangel Island (Russian: о́стров Вра́нгеля, tr. ostrov Vrangelya; IPA: [ˈostrəf ˈvrangʲɪlʲə]) is a Siberian island in the Arctic Ocean, between the Chukchi Sea and East Siberian Sea.

Native settlers
Paleo-Eskimos, Inuit, Chukchi and earlier Paleo-Siberians have lived on it intermittently since at least about 1700BC established camps on the southern side of the island for marine hunters, but Wrangel Island was empty when it was first discovered by Europeans. Woolly mammoths survived there until 2,500–2,000 BC, with the last few individuals being killed by humans in ~1,700BC.

The local Chukchi legend tells the story of a chief Krachai (or Krächoj, Krahay, Khrakhai), who fled with his people (the Krachaians or Krahays, also identified as the Onkilon or Omoki to the Siberian Yupik people) across the ice to settle in a northern land.

The story proved that they had conceptualised and possibly had once actually knew of a further land mass to the north even though it was no major or outstanding place of worth. The story is given more validity by the facts of the annual migration of reindeer across the ice, as well as the appearance of slate spear-points washed up on Arctic shores, made in a fashion unknown to the Chukchi.

Michael E. Krauss has recently stated Wrangel Island was a way station on a trade route linking the Inuit settlement at Point Hope, Alaska with the north Siberian coast. It may have been inhabited as far back as late prehistoric and early historic times by Inuit settlers from North America. He goes on to suggests that the departure of these colonists was related to the Krachai legend.

Discovery
In modern times it was re-discovered by the Cossack Sergeant Stepan Andreyev in 1764. Tikegen Land, Andreyev found evidence of its Siberian inhabitants, the Krahay.

Eventually, the island was discovered and named after Baron Ferdinand von Wrangel, who went there after both reading Andreyev's report and hearing the Chukchi stories of land at the island's approximate coordinates, in an expedition from 1820 to 1824. He met with no success.

103 years later, it was found on August 1867, Thomas Long, an American whaling captain, "approached it as near as fifteen miles and named the land mass "Wrangell Land".

George W. DeLong, commanding USS Jeannette, led an expedition in 1879 attempting to reach the North Pole, expecting to go by the "east side of Kellett land," which he thought extended far into the Arctic. His ship became locked in the polar ice pack and drifted westward, passing within sight of Wrangel before being crushed and sunk in the vicinity of the New Siberian Islands.

A party from the USRC Corwin, under the command of Calvin L. Hooper, landed on Wrangel Island on 12 August 1881 and claimed the island for the United States and named it "New Columbia."

The expedition was seeking the USS Jeannette and two missing whalers in addition to conducting general exploration.

In 1911, the Russian Arctic Ocean Hydrographic Expedition on icebreakers Vaygach and Taymyr under Boris Vilkitsky, landed on the island. In 1916 the Tsarist government declared that the island belonged to the Russian empire.

n 1914, members of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, organized by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, were marooned on Wrangel Island for nine months after their ship, the Karluk, was crushed in the ice pack. The survivors were rescued by the American motorized fishing schooner King & Winge after Captain Robert Bartlett walked across the Chukchi Sea to Siberia to summon help.

In 1921, Stefansson sent five settlers (the Canadian Allan Crawford, three Americans: Fred Maurer, Lorne Knight and Milton Galle, and Iñupiat seamstress and cook Ada Blackjack) to the island in a speculative attempt to claim it for Canada. Stefansson had claimed that his purpose was to head off a possible Japanese claim, but this is at best dubious, since Japan almost certainly knew little if any about the island's existence. In 1923, the sole survivor of the Wrangel Island expedition, Ada Blackjack, was rescued by a ship that left another party of 13 (American Charles Wells and 12 Inuit).

In 1924, the Soviet Union removed the American and 13 Inuit (one was born on the island) of this settlement aboard the Krasny Oktiabr. Wells and so did an Inuit child subsequently died of ill heath Vladivostok during a diplomatic American-Soviet row about an American boundary marker on the Siberian coast (which America wanted all for it's self). The other settlers were deported from Vladivostok to the Chinese border post Suifenhe, but the Chinese government didn't want to accept them because the American consul in Harbin told them the Inuit were not American citizens, because America regarded Inuet, Native American Indians and Blacks as 'not human' and afforded them the same status as animals. Eventually the American Red Cross came up with $1,600 for their return via China, Japan and Seattle (another kid was born here and then died), back to Nome, Alaska.

In 1926, the government of the Soviet Union reaffirmed the Tsarist claim to sovereignty over Wrangel Island.

Name sake
It was named after the Baron Ferdinand von Wrangel (1797–1870).

Landscape

 * 1) Wrangel Island is about 125 km (78 mi) wide.
 * 2) It 's 7,600 km2 (2,900 sq mi) in area.

Wrangel Island  is hilly since it consists of folded, faulted, and metamorphosed volcanic, intrusive, and sedimentary rocks ranging in age from Upper Precambrian to Lower Mesozoic.

It is very coald and prone to cyclonic blizards in the winter.

Climate
With a tundra climate (Köppen climate classification ET).

The former village of of Ushakovskoye experiences harsh weather almost all year round, and with temperatures only struggling above freezing for a few brief summer months, with temperatures often below freezing from September all the way through to the following June. Grass, moss and lichen live on the island, along with a few small shrubs in the more sheltered places.

Normal temperatures are very low.

The snow fall is

Wildlife
Wrangel Island is a major breeding ground for polar bears and has the highest density of polar bar dens in the world. Other mammalian life forms include seals, walrus, lemmings and Russians. During the summer it is visited by many types of Arctic birds. The arctic fox has made home on the island. The cetaceans such as bowhead, gray, and beluga whales can be seen close to shores.

Woolly mammoths survived there until 2,500–2,000 BC, with the last few individuals being killed by humans in ~1,700BC.

Tourism
There is a Russian weather station and 2 former Chukchi fishing settlements on the southern side of the island (Ushakovskoye and Zvyozdny) on the shore of Somnitelnaya Bay. A handfull of sciantists and weathermen viset the island wide nature reserve a year.

Also see

 * 1) Solovetsky Islands in Siberia, Russia
 * 2) Commander Islands in Siberia, Russia
 * 3) Franz Josef Land, Western Russia
 * 4) Severnaya Zemlya Islands in Siberia, Russia
 * 5) Sakhalin Island

Links
http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Wrangel_Island