New Siberia
Encyclopedia
Anzhu Islands
The Anzhu Islands or Anjou Islands are a geographical subgroup of the New Siberian Islands archipelago. They are located between the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea in the Russian Arctic. The total area of the islands is approx...
, the northern subgroup of the New Siberian Islands
New Siberian Islands
The New Siberian Islands are an archipelago, located to the North of the East Siberian coast between the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea north of the Sakha Republic....
lying between the Laptev Sea
Laptev Sea
The Laptev Sea is a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean. It is located between the northern coast of Siberia, the Taimyr Peninsula, Severnaya Zemlya and the New Siberian Islands. Its northern boundary passes from the Arctic Cape to a point with co-ordinates of 79°N and 139°E, and ends at the Anisiy...
and East Siberian Sea
East Siberian Sea
The East Siberian Sea is a marginal sea in the Arctic Ocean. It is located between the Arctic Cape to the north, the coast of Siberia to the south, the New Siberian Islands to the west and Cape Billings, close to Chukotka, and Wrangel Island to the east...
. Its area of approximately 6,200 km² places it just outside the 100 largest islands in the world. New Siberia Island is low lying, rising to only 76 m and covered with tundra
Tundra
In physical geography, tundra is a biome where the tree growth is hindered by low temperatures and short growing seasons. The term tundra comes through Russian тундра from the Kildin Sami word tūndâr "uplands," "treeless mountain tract." There are three types of tundra: Arctic tundra, alpine...
vegetation. The island is a part of the territory of the Sakha (Yakutia) Republic of Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
.
The fact that this island is called "New Siberia" and is located in the "New Siberian Islands" could cause some confusion.
Geology
New Siberia Island consists of clastic sedimentSediment
Sediment is naturally occurring material that is broken down by processes of weathering and erosion, and is subsequently transported by the action of fluids such as wind, water, or ice, and/or by the force of gravity acting on the particle itself....
s ranging from Late Cretaceous
Cretaceous
The Cretaceous , derived from the Latin "creta" , usually abbreviated K for its German translation Kreide , is a geologic period and system from circa to million years ago. In the geologic timescale, the Cretaceous follows the Jurassic period and is followed by the Paleogene period of the...
to Pleistocene
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....
in age. The Late Cretaceous sediments consist of extensively folded layers of gray and greenish gray tuffaceous sand
Sand
Sand is a naturally occurring granular material composed of finely divided rock and mineral particles.The composition of sand is highly variable, depending on the local rock sources and conditions, but the most common constituent of sand in inland continental settings and non-tropical coastal...
, tuffaceous silt
Silt
Silt is granular material of a size somewhere between sand and clay whose mineral origin is quartz and feldspar. Silt may occur as a soil or as suspended sediment in a surface water body...
, pebbly sand, and layers of brown coal
Coal
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...
exposed in sea cliffs along it southwest coast. The sand and silt often contain either volcanic glass
Volcanic glass
Volcanic glass is the amorphous product of rapidly cooling magma. Like all types of glass, it is a state of matter intermediate between the close-packed, highly ordered array of a crystal and the highly disordered array of gas...
, fossil
Fossil
Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...
plants, rhyolite
Rhyolite
This page is about a volcanic rock. For the ghost town see Rhyolite, Nevada, and for the satellite system, see Rhyolite/Aquacade.Rhyolite is an igneous, volcanic rock, of felsic composition . It may have any texture from glassy to aphanitic to porphyritic...
pebble
Pebble
A pebble is a clast of rock with a particle size of 4 to 64 millimetres based on the Krumbein phi scale of sedimentology. Pebbles are generally considered to be larger than granules and smaller than cobbles . A rock made predominantly of pebbles is termed a conglomerate...
s, or some combination of them. Eocene
Eocene
The Eocene Epoch, lasting from about 56 to 34 million years ago , is a major division of the geologic timescale and the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the Cenozoic Era. The Eocene spans the time from the end of the Palaeocene Epoch to the beginning of the Oligocene Epoch. The start of the...
sand, silt, clay
Clay
Clay is a general term including many combinations of one or more clay minerals with traces of metal oxides and organic matter. Geologic clay deposits are mostly composed of phyllosilicate minerals containing variable amounts of water trapped in the mineral structure.- Formation :Clay minerals...
, and brown coal overlies an erosional unconformity
Unconformity
An unconformity is a buried erosion surface separating two rock masses or strata of different ages, indicating that sediment deposition was not continuous. In general, the older layer was exposed to erosion for an interval of time before deposition of the younger, but the term is used to describe...
cut into the Late Cretaceous sediments. Within the northwest part of New Siberia Island, these sediments grade into clays that contain fragments of marine
Marine (ocean)
Marine is an umbrella term. As an adjective it is usually applicable to things relating to the sea or ocean, such as marine biology, marine ecology and marine geology...
bivalves. Directly overlying the Eocene sediments and another erosional unconformity are sands of Oligocene
Oligocene
The Oligocene is a geologic epoch of the Paleogene Period and extends from about 34 million to 23 million years before the present . As with other older geologic periods, the rock beds that define the period are well identified but the exact dates of the start and end of the period are slightly...
and Early Miocene
Miocene
The Miocene is a geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about . The Miocene was named by Sir Charles Lyell. Its name comes from the Greek words and and means "less recent" because it has 18% fewer modern sea invertebrates than the Pliocene. The Miocene follows the Oligocene...
age. They contain thin beds of silt, mud, clay, and pebbles. These sands contain fossil plants and lagoonal, swamp, and lacustrine diatom
Diatom
Diatoms are a major group of algae, and are one of the most common types of phytoplankton. Most diatoms are unicellular, although they can exist as colonies in the shape of filaments or ribbons , fans , zigzags , or stellate colonies . Diatoms are producers within the food chain...
s. These sands are overlain by Pliocene
Pliocene
The Pliocene Epoch is the period in the geologic timescale that extends from 5.332 million to 2.588 million years before present. It is the second and youngest epoch of the Neogene Period in the Cenozoic Era. The Pliocene follows the Miocene Epoch and is followed by the Pleistocene Epoch...
sediments consisting of layers of sand, silt, mud, peat
Peat
Peat is an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation matter or histosol. Peat forms in wetland bogs, moors, muskegs, pocosins, mires, and peat swamp forests. Peat is harvested as an important source of fuel in certain parts of the world...
, and pebbles.
Except for the Derevyannye Hills, Pleistocene
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....
sediments blanket almost the entire surface of New Siberia Island. These deposits consist of layers of marine
Marine (ocean)
Marine is an umbrella term. As an adjective it is usually applicable to things relating to the sea or ocean, such as marine biology, marine ecology and marine geology...
sediments overlain by terrestrial sediments. The lower marine sediments are composed of three superimposed beds of marine to brackish water clay containing fossil mollusks and capped with peat. The overlying terrestrial sediments consist of an ice complex composed of ice-rich wind-blown silt in which ice wedges have developed. This ice complex accumulated over tens of thousands of years during the Late Pleistocene, through the Last Glacial Maximum
Last Glacial Maximum
The Last Glacial Maximum refers to a period in the Earth's climate history when ice sheets were at their maximum extension, between 26,500 and 19,000–20,000 years ago, marking the peak of the last glacial period. During this time, vast ice sheets covered much of North America, northern Europe and...
, until it stopped at about 10,000 BP. During this period of tens of thousands of years, the formation of ice complex buried and preserved in permafrost an enormous number of mammoth
Mammoth
A mammoth is any species of the extinct genus Mammuthus. These proboscideans are members of Elephantidae, the family of elephants and mammoths, and close relatives of modern elephants. They were often equipped with long curved tusks and, in northern species, a covering of long hair...
tusk
Tusk
Tusks are elongated, continuously growing front teeth, usually but not always in pairs, that protrude well beyond the mouth of certain mammal species. They are most commonly canines, as with warthogs, wild boar, and walruses, or, in the case of elephants and narwhals, elongated incisors...
s and bones and the bones of other “megafauna
Megafauna
In terrestrial zoology, megafauna are "giant", "very large" or "large" animals. The most common thresholds used are or...
”.
New Siberia Island is noted for abundant upright tree trunks, logs, leaf prints, and other plant debris that occur within sediments that are exposed along sea cliffs and within the uplands of the Derevyannye Hills along its southern coast. Because of the abundance of exposed coalified logs and upright trunks, early explorers and paleobotanists referred to the Derevyannye Hills as either the "Wood Mountains", "Wood Hills", or "Tree Mountain". At one time, the highly folded layers of sand, silt, mud, clay, and brown coal containing these coalified tree fossils were once thought to have accumulated during either the Miocene or Eocene Epoch. These sediments and the fossil trunks and logs, which they contain, are now known to date to the Late Cretaceous Period (Turonian
Turonian
The Turonian is, in the ICS' geologic timescale, the second age in the Late Cretaceous epoch, or a stage in the Upper Cretaceous series. It spans the time between 93.5 ± 0.8 Ma and 89.3 ± 1 Ma...
Stage). Baron Von Toll, Dr. Klubov and others, Dr. Dorofeev and others, and other publications all demonstrate that the claims by some authors, i.e. Mr. Southall, that the "Wood Hills" of New Siberia Island are either partially or completely "formed of driftwood" are completely erroneous.
Vegetation
Rush/grass, forb, cryptogam tundra covers the New Siberia Island. It is tundra consisting mostly of very low-growing grasses, rushes, forbs, mosses, lichens, and liverworts. These plants either mostly or completely cover the surface of the ground. The soils are typically moist, fine-grained, and often hummocky.History
Yakov SannikovYakov Sannikov
Yakov Sannikov was a Russian merchant and explorer of the New Siberian Islands.In 1800, Sannikov discovered and charted Stolbovoy Island, and in 1805 Faddeyevsky Island. In 1809-1810, he took part in the expedition led by Matvei Gedenschtrom. In 1810, Sannikov crossed the island of New Siberia...
was the first recorded European to set foot on New Siberia Island, in 1806. He discovered it during one of several hunting expeditions financed by merchants, Semyon and Lev Syrovatsky.
External links
- anonymous, nd, New Siberian Islands aerial photographs of these islands.
- Andreev, A.A., and D.M. Peteet, 1999, Climate and Diet of Mammoths in the East Siberian Arctic . Science Briefs (August 1999). Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, New York. Last visited July 12, 2008.
- Anisimov, M.A., and V.E. Tumskoy, 2002, Environmental History of the Novosibirskie Islands for the last 12 ka. 32nd International Arctic Workshop, Program and Abstracts 2002. Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado at Boulder, pp 23–25.
- Kuznetsova, T.V., L.D. Sulerzhitsky, Ch. Siegert, 2001, New data on the “Mammoth” fauna of the Laptev Shelf Land (East Siberian Arctic), The World of Elephants - International Congress, Rome 2001. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Centro di Studio per il Quaternario e l'Evoluzione Ambientale, Università di Roma, Roma, Italy.
- Schirrmeister, L., H.-W. Hubberten, V. Rachold, and V.G. Grosse, 2005, Lost world - Late Quaternary environment of periglacial Arctic shelves and coastal lowlands in NE-Siberia. 2nd International Alfred Wegener Symposium Bremerhaven, October, 30 - November 2, 2005.