Severnaya Zemlya north from Siberia. The climate data below, taken from the Golomyanniy Meteorological Station gives an indication of the weather experienced in the archipelago. Severnaya Zemlya is a polar desert with sparse vegetation and permafrost at less than . Rare vascular plants include species of "Cerastium" and "Saxifraga". Non-vascular plants include the moss genera "Detrichum", "Dicranum", "Pogonatum", "Sanionia", "Bryum", "Orthothecium" and "Tortula", as well as the lichen genera "Cetraria", "Thamnolia", "Cornicularia", "Lecidea", "Ochrolechia" and "Parmelia". Common flowering plants of the high Arctic such as the purple saxifrage ("Saxifraga oppositifolia") and the Arctic poppy ("Papaver radicatum") also occur on Severnaya Zemlya. According
Austfonna of Svalbard and Norway). Austfonna Austfonna is an ice cap located on Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago in Norway. Covering an area of 8,492 km it is the largest ice cap by area and with 1,900 km (excluding Vegafonna) the second largest by volume in Europe, after the Vatnajökull in Iceland (not counting the still larger Severny Island ice cap of Novaya Zemlya, Russia, which is located in the extreme northeast of Europe), and the seventh largest in the world. Austfonna has a thickness of up to 560 metres (235 meters average thickness), and is 200 km in circumference. The