The Shelonsky Islands is an island group in 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...

. It is located in the coastal lowlands of the Yana Bay

Yana Bay

The Yana Bay is the most important gulf of the Laptev Sea. It is located between Cape Buor-Khaya on its western side and the Ebelyakh Bay at its eastern end....

, east of the mouths of the Yana river

Yana River

The Yana River , is a river in Sakha in Russia, located between the Lena to the west and the Indigirka to the east.It is 872 km in length. The area of its basin is 238,000 km², whilst its annual discharge totals approximately . Most of this discharge occurs in May and June as the ice on the...

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The Shelonsky Islands are marshy and flat.

• The largest is Vostochnyy Shelonsky, it is located on the northern shores of the Manyko Peninsula (Poluostrov Manyko). This island has a length of 17 km and a maximum width of 7.2 km. Vostochnyy has many small lakes and becomes narrower towards its eastern end. East of this island lies a deep inlet stretching southwards known in Russian as Sellyakhskaya Guba.
• Zapadnyy Shelonsky Island is much smaller, being only 2.5 km across. It lies off Vostochnyy's western tip, separated from it by a 2 km wide sound.
• Yuzhnyy Shelonsky lies detached from the main group, 20 km further to the west, off the NE shores of Yarok Island. It is 3 km long and 0.7 km wide.
• There are a few other islands in the group, all of them close to Vostochnyy, but they seem to have no name.

The Yana delta, the coastal area off which these islands lie, is an extensive wetland zone. It is subject to severe Arctic weather with frequent gales and blizzards. Further north, the sea in the Yana Bay is frozen with thick ice for about eight months yearly, so that these coastal islands are merged with the mainland most of the year.

Administratively the Shelonsky group belongs to the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) of the Russian Federation.