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,
Severnaya Zemlya as Arctic lemming, which is present on all of the large islands and, in some places has been recorded to reach a density of 500 per km (1,300 per sq mi). The Arctic fox ("Alopex lagopus") has been known to den on the islands, with several hundred observed in the 1980s. Other mammals occasionally observed include the wolf ("Canis lupus"), the polar bear ("Ursus maritimus"), ermine ("Mustela erminea"), Arctic hare ("Lepus timidus"), and reindeer ("Rangifer tarandus"). The discovery of Severnaya Zemlya is the subject of Veniamin Kaverin's novel "The Two Captains" as well as its stage adaptation, "Nord-Ost". Severnaya Zemlya