For years a bleak island chain sandwiched between the Laptev and East Siberian seas off Russia’s Arctic coast has been viewed as one of the most difficult-to-reach places in the northern hemisphere. If it has been viewed at all.
With winter temperatures habitually plunging to -30oC or lower, it is also one of the more inhospitable tracts on the Northern Sea Route.
Now, as world attention is consumed by developments in the US,
Daily Maverick/Our Burning Planet can confirm that an event with repercussions likely to echo down the generations quietly took place elsewhere, in the heart of this seemingly forgotten corner of Planet Earth.