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,
Baltica data makes it difficult to locate the margin in the Arctic. Ordovician faunas indicate that most of Svalbard, including Bjørnøya, was part of Laurentia, but Franz Josef Land and Kvitøya (an eastern island of the Svalbard archipelago) most likely became part of Baltica in the Timanide Orogeny. The Taymyr Peninsula, in contrast, never was part of Baltica: southern Taymyr was part of Siberia whilst northern Taymyr and the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago were part of the independent Kara Terrane in the early Palaeozoic. The eastern margin, the Uralide orogen, extends from the Arctic Novaya Zemlya archipelago to the Aral Sea. The