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By APD writer Aditya Nugraha
Russian navy has discovered five new islands from the melting glaciers in remote Arctic, to name those islands after identifying proper related case for each of the island, a Russian senior military officer said.
Russia’s Commander in Chief of the Northern Fleet Vice Admiral Alexander Moiseyev said those islands were discovered in a Russian expedition conducted in August and September in Vize Bay off Novaya Zemlya, a vast mountainous archipelago with two main islands.
Those islands had previously been seen on satellite images but the expedition was the first to see them, he said.
"Mainly this is caused by changes to the ice situation. Before these were glaciers, we thought they were (part of) the main glacier. Melting, collapse and temperature changes led to these islands being uncovered,” Moiseyev, who led the expedition, told a press conference here recently.
"Each island will receive a name but first you have to lay out the case for it first," he added.
The expedition also confirmed the existence of an island that had been previously mapped as a peninsula of Hall Island, part of the Franz Josef Land archipelago, west of Novaya Zemlya.
The expedition that explored two archipelagoes - Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya - involved some 60 people including civilians from the Russian Geographic Society. It was also the first aboard a rescue towboat instead of an icebreaker.
Russia has opened a string of military and scientific bases in the Arctic in recent years rising temperatures has opened up shipping routes, making hitherto inaccessible mineral resources easier to exploit.
A United Nations on global warming report said last month that glacier loss in the Arctic in the period from 2015 to 2019 was more than in any other five-year period on record.
(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)
