Cap of the North Cap of the North The Cap of the North ("Nordkalotten" in Norwegian and Swedish, or "Pohjoiskalotti" in Finnish) consists of the counties Finnmark, Nordland and Troms in Norway, Norrbotten County in Sweden, Lapland/Lappi Region in Finland and Murmansk Oblast in Russia. This area is roughly equal to the parts of Fennoscandia (including the Kola Peninsula in Russia) lying north of the Arctic Circle. The region has a subarctic climate and is home to the majority of the Sámi people. Historian Per Guttorm Kvenanger has criticized the term "Nordkalotten" for displacing the overlapping term Sápmi and hiding the "Sami character" of
Arctic policy of Russia in 1732. The Great Northern Expedition, which lasted from 1733 to 1743, was one of the largest exploration enterprises in history, organized and led by Vitus Bering, Aleksei Chirikov and a number of other major explorers. A party of the expedition personally led by Bering and Chirikov discovered southern Alaska, the Aleutian Islands and the Commander Islands, while the parties led by Stepan Malygin, Dmitry Ovtsyn, Fyodor Minin, Semyon Chelyuskin, Vasily Pronchischev, Khariton Laptev and Dmitry Laptev mapped most of the Arctic coastline of Russia (from the White Sea in Europe to the mouth of Kolyma River in Asia). The