Severnaya Zemlya Severnaya Zemlya Severnaya Zemlya ( (Northern Land), ) is a archipelago in the Russian high Arctic. It lies off Siberia's Taymyr Peninsula, separated from the mainland by the Vilkitsky Strait. This archipelago separates two marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean, the Kara Sea in the west and the Laptev Sea in the east. Severnaya Zemlya was first noted in 1913 and first charted in 1930–32, making it the last sizeable archipelago on Earth to be explored. Administratively, the islands form part of Russia's Krasnoyarsk Krai federal subject. In Soviet times there were a number of research stations in different locations,
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