In England there is Stonehenge, literally "stone henge" - included in the World Heritage List. In Chile, Easter Island is also a World Heritage Site. Both places are well-known and are in demand among numerous tourists, explorers and lovers of riddles and mysteries.
We also have Something that is not inferior to these artifacts. This is Kigilyakhi on the Bolshoy Lyakhovsky island of the Novosibirsk Islands archipelago - literally “Stone People”. A mystical place. The stone pillars really look like petrified giants that reached the borders of the Earth and the Ocean and became petrified from the endless ice space they saw. The ice coast is steep. Under the low polar sun, a dull wall of fossil ice gleams in places. At its foot, covered with sediment, streams begin. There are holes around, washed by the sea in the ice body of the caves. The noise of melted pieces falling from the earthen cornice hanging over the ice wall is heard.
Solar radiation, currents, waves, rains and winds are actively destroying the ice shores, which is also facilitated by ice floes that were broken after winter, which, like huge plows, loosen the bottom of the sea around them. The rate of destruction of the coast is up to thirty or more meters per year, on average - five meters. On the Bolshoy Lyakhovsky island of the Novosibirsk Islands archipelago, which are located between the Laptev and East Siberian seas, next to the polar station, there is a place that simply mesmerizes with its fabulous view - the Stone City. And this city is not a creation of a disappeared people, but of eternal nature, mysterious and exciting.
The Yakut name of the Kigilyakhi peninsula is usually attributed not so much to the peninsula itself as to the granite structures on it, the most interesting creations of polar nature. “Kigilyakhi” in Russian means “stone people”. Local hunters believed that the creators of these sculptures were "shaman gods", and not the water and wind, who had been working here for centuries.
Giant - fifteen to twenty meters high - pillars, slabs - resemble an ancient dilapidated city. In this city, there are peculiar streets, alleys, dead ends, even squares, compressed by silent cold walls. Looking closely, on the walls you can see some kind of pediments, belvederes, balconies supported by a colonnade and elaborate curls of capitals … Pieces of rock overgrown with stunted northern vegetation, together with a lot of ice remnants, formed bizarre shapes, sometimes similar to various animals. One of these fossils is said to be a dog team. Here is a stone lion, followed by a fabulous sphinx. Near the “buildings” there are rocks that resemble sculptures of human figures, similar to the monuments of Easter Island. Right there, a man and a woman look at each other. They are called "Luzhkov and Baturina". And, indeed,very similar. And a little further away, what cannot but cause a smile is a huge manhood fifteen meters in height. Nature had to work so hard.
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In the center of this fabulous creation of nature is something resembling a temple. Through a gaping hole you can enter a small hall. On four sides there are uneven battlements of the walls, built of rounded granite blocks, with eaves and steps weakened by water. On them - lichen stains. Water seeps out, leaving rusty streaks on the walls. Near the temple there is an abandoned "cemetery". Well, how else can you name these rows of stones, resembling gravestones, sarcophagi, urns, stone tombstones with the remains of grave sculptures? Everything is overgrown with greenish-yellow and black lichens. It seems, stretch out your hand, erase them - and unsolved letters of an unknown people will open on the stone.
Bolshoi Lyakhovsky and Maly Lyakhovsky are the southernmost islands of the Novosibirsk archipelago. The discoverer of these lands was Mercury Vagin. He visited here in 1711. The brave explorer made extensive plans to explore unknown lands. The second expedition to these islands cost him his life. Unable to withstand the harsh tests, his companions, the Yakut Cossacks, decided to interrupt the campaign and return. At night, they treacherously killed Vagin and his son … and for many years hid the news of the discovery of new lands.
And only 60 years later, in 1770, the merchant Lyakhov again finds these lands, and the islands receive his name. He was the first to receive the right to mine mammoth bones on these islands. There used to be a lot of it here. Thousands of poods were sent to the capital.
Now on the island of Bolshoy Lyakhovsky, of the inhabitants, only workers of the polar station, and from spring to autumn, work artels for the extraction of mammoth tusks. Who is licensed, and who at their own peril and risk. With modern technology, getting here is not so difficult. From Cape Svyatoy Nos to Bolshoy Lyakhovsky Island, about 100 kilometers.
The Bolshoi and Maly Lyakhovsky islands are decreasing every year: crumbling shores, cracks, collapsed blocks tens of meters in diameter … The picture suggests catastrophic natural phenomena, earthquakes. It's hard to believe that all this was done by the silent and gradual melting of ice under the heat of the sun. This suggests that the islands were formed by alluvial mudslides, which froze, and with each summer season it melts and the islands shrink, or even disappear altogether. As once the Land of Sannikov!
Yes Yes! Not only the shores of the former "mammoth continent" are disappearing, but also entire islands, whose shores are composed of loess and ice.
Back in 1815, two high islands were discovered in the Laptev Sea - Vasilievsky and Semenovsky. Both islands, as the descriptions say, consisted of subsurface ice (loess) covered with silt and tundra. This ice was exposed near the coastline, therefore it was severely destroyed due to melting. In 1823, Lieutenant Anjou, who was conducting coastal surveys, determined the island to be four miles long and a quarter mile wide. The 1912 Northern Hydrographic Expedition measured Vasilievsky Island and found that its length was not four miles, but only 4.6 kilometers. In 1936 the hydrographers of Vasilievsky Island did not find it. Thermokarst and sea waves "ate" it. The islands of Diomede, Mercury, Figurin disappeared even earlier.
Not only the shores are being washed away. When the lens of ice melts, the earth swells and "bumps" are formed up to 4-5 meters high. Geologists call them bayjarahi. Huge, like giant anthills, they rise among the tundra. With a loud splash, now large, now small earth masses fall off the edges of these "bumps". Having turned into a thick jelly, similar to a lava flow, the liquefied earth flows down the frozen soil into the lowlands and, finally, into the sea. Like this……
