History of Franz Josef Land for a national park covering northern Novaya Zemlya and Franz Josef Land were launched in the 2000s. When the Russian Arctic National Park was established on 15June 2009, Franz Josef Land and Victoria Island were excluded. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited the archipelago in 2010, describing it as a "giant rubbish tip". By 2011 the national park had been expanded to include Franz Josef Land in a move to better accommodate tourism in the archipelago. From 2012, Russia commenced a 1.5 billion ruble, three-year clean-up project to remove more than 100,000 tonnes of waste which had accumulated during the Soviet
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