Severnaya Zemlya appeared to the north of the archipelago. Although located not far off the northern coast of Russia, nested among Arctic ice-locked waters, the archipelago that is now known as Severnaya Zemlya was not formally recorded until the 20th century. Earlier explorers deemed that there was a land mass in the general area of the archipelago, such as in the report by Matvei Gedenschtrom and Yakov Sannikov made in 1810 at the time of their exploration of the New Siberian Islands. Later in the 19th century Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld during the Vega Expedition sailed very close to this land in 1878
12th Chief Directorate Another task of the 12th GU MO is to prevent so-called "nuclear terrorism," but this is a relatively modern task, which did not exist formerly. Besides these nuclear arsenal bases, the 12th Chief Directorate maintains several nuclear weapons research institutes in Moscow and in Sergiev Posad, near Moscow, with their subsidiaries located at nuclear testing grounds in Semipalatinsk-21 and on Novaya Zemlya Archipelago, and in several other cities (Saint Petersburg, for example). It also maintains a separate research institute tasked with developing nuclear explosions detection technology. Another function of the 12th GU MO is to serve as a link between