Severnaya Zemlya but currently there are no human inhabitants in Severnaya Zemlya except for the Prima Polar Station near Cape Baranov. The largest glacier in the Russian Federation, the Academy of Sciences Glacier, is located in Severnaya Zemlya. The archipelago is notable as well in connection with the ongoing multiyear Arctic sea ice decline. Until recently, ice joined the islands to Eurasia, even at its smallest extent during the late summer melt season, blocking the Northeast Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific. By the late summer of 2012, however, the permanent ice had reached a record low extent and open water
Austfonna 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 ice dome reaches an