Students discover that an entire island has disappeared from the map in the Russian Arctic

by Andrea
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Students discover that an entire island has disappeared from the map in the Russian Arctic

Alexandra Barymova / Moscow State University

Students discover that an entire island has disappeared from the map in the Russian Arctic

Ilha de Mesyatsev

After several years of decreasing in size, Mesyatsev Island has completely melted and is no longer visible in satellite images.

A group of students from Russia discovered in September that a island disappeared from the mapafter a comparison of satellite images. The initiative was part of a school project called RISKSAT, run by the Moscow Aviation Institute.

Mesyatsev Island was basically an iceberg and was located in the Land of Franz Joseph, a Russian archipelago with 191 islands in the Arctic Ocean. The hypothesis is that it separated from Eva-Live Island, to which it was connected, before 1985, due to global warming.

The location was important for walruses have their babiesaccording to Yevgeny Yermolov, head of the department for the preservation of historical and cultural heritage of the Russian Arctic National Park, told the state news website TASS. However, the animals had to find a new place to meet during the breeding season.

Alexey Kucheiko, a researcher at the Moscow Aviation Institute, believes the cause of the island’s disappearance was rising temperatures caused by climate change. “The island completely melted“, he states.

In 2010, Mesyatsev Island had a surface area of ​​about 1.1 million square meters. In 2015, the island already measured around 530 thousand square meters, less than half of its total just five years earlier. By 2022, the island had become so small that researchers no longer monitored it, believing its disappearance was imminent.

On August 12, 2024, the young people found that it had shrunk to just 30,000 m², becoming 99.7% smaller than 14 years ago. On September 3, footage revealed that the island had completely disappeared.

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