The adventure literary novel "Sannikov's Land", written by the well-known USSR candidate of geological and geographical sciences, author Vladimir Obruchev, was released in 1926. This piece of fiction has sparked great interest in a mysterious, unconquered piece of land in the midst of the seas of the far North.
In 1973, directors Albert Mkrtchyan and Leonid Popov shot a feature film based on the novel of the same name. The film told about the hard everyday life of the discoverers, the struggle of strong characters and the sweet moment of the hero's discovery of a picture of a new, previously unknown, northern land. Is the feature film based on real facts or is it just a skillfully filmed fictional plot by screenwriters Vladislav Fedoseev and Mark Zakharov to grab the attention of viewers?
Historical essays tell that indeed in 1810 the Imperial Russian Geographical Community organized a polar expedition to describe and compile an accurate map of the archipelago of the New Siberian Islands. During this trip, reaching the northern tip of Kotelny Island, the discoverer Yakov Sannikov examined a new land area that had not been noted anywhere else.
The head of the expedition, Gedenshtrom Matvey, recorded in the travel log that the group discovered rocky mountains in the northwest, 70 versts (a little more than 70 kilometers) from their location, that appeared as if from nowhere. In the report of Yakov Sannikov, it was indicated that three stony areas of land were seen. However, Matvey Gedenshtrom put only two of them on the map, referring to a thorough check of the find, during which it turned out that one island is completely a layer of ice and an accumulation of ice hummocks of enormous size.
Maybe at that moment there was a heavy fog, and with practically zero visibility, the human imagination completed in the minds of polar explorers such a desired new part of the land, as happens, for example, in the desert sands, the well-known ghostly mirages.
In December 1818, the Naval Ministry in the city of St. Petersburg received a document with testimonies of several representatives of the indigenous people of the North about the existence, east of the island of New Siberia, an unknown land inhabited by wild people. The Russian government has decided to equip two northern research expeditions at once. One of them, along the Kolyma, was led by the Russian navigator Ferdinand Wrangel, and the other expedition along the Yana River was led by Admiral Pyotr Anzhu. Both search groups moved towards the Novosibirsk Islands archipelago.
In March 1821, the expeditionary group of the polar explorer Peter Anjou finally left the mouth of the Yana River, continued northward and soon reached Kotelny Island in the archipelago of the New Siberian Islands. The weather conditions were not favorable due to very low temperatures, even the chronometers stopped because of the severe cold. However, the leader of the expedition decided to move further to the North, and in early April the detachment of polar explorers set off. Having reached the northernmost point of the island, the explorers observed with disappointment the open horizon and even ice for many kilometers. Nevertheless, making its way through the ice hummocks, the group continued for two more days in the direction of the coordinates marked by Sannikov, but to no avail.
In the middle of 1886, the outstanding Russian geologist Tol Eduard Vasilyevich studied Kotelny Island. On August 13, the weather was perfectly clear, thanks to excellent visibility, he recognized the contours of the mountains, connecting northeast with low-lying land. He could see these heights so well that he was even able to calculate the approximate distance of 150 versts, and put forward an assumption about the magmatic composition of their rocky basalt rocks. Unfortunately, the geologist did not manage to get closer to the visible Sannikov land either that year, or later during his next polar expedition in the spring of 1893, when the scientist again saw the uninhabited mysterious northern land.
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The data obtained by Sannikov, Gedenshtrom and Tol have indirect confirmation. The Chukchi have long noticed that in the summer the birds fly further beyond the New Siberian Islands to the north, and in the fall they return here with the grown-up offspring. This means that somewhere to the north of the archipelago there is an invisible land where migratory birds nest.
The second indirect confirmation of the hypothesis of the existence of a new land can be the structure of the Laptev Sea bottom. More than half of this reservoir is shallow water up to 50 meters deep. The formation of such a shelf is due to the fact that tens of thousands of years ago the sea level was much lower, and the entire territory of the modern shallow water constituted a single continent. Often, fishermen's vessels in these places stumble upon a sandbank or a sandbar, and therefore there is a high probability of finding a new island that has risen from the water.
Researchers have all the time strived for a mystical unsolved land, because the discovery of a new land in the North would make a huge invaluable contribution to the development of sciences such as geology, paleontology, oceanology, cartography, meteorology and a number of other natural scientific disciplines.
According to the conclusion of modern scientists, Sannikov Land really existed in the nineteenth century and consisted mainly of fossil ice, about one million years old, the same one lies at a depth of up to three thousand meters on mainland land. As a result of weathering and destruction of the upper rocks, the previously protected fossil ice under the influence of warm air, sea waves, sun rays quickly melted, and soon the island disappeared. Unconquered earth has never been found by any polar explorer during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and now the twenty-first digital century with all its electronic power of modern icebreakers, aviation and smart space satellites capable of fixing objects of any size and distance from orbit. space.