Novaya Zemlya, Arctic archipelago in northwestern Russia.
Novaya Zemlya is an Arctic archipelago in northwestern Russia that lies between the Barents Sea and the Kara Sea. The two main islands, Severny and Yuzhny, stretch over nine hundred kilometers and remain separated by a narrow strait.
Russian hunters from Novgorod reached the islands as early as the 11th century and used them as a base for fur trapping and fishing. Between 1954 and 1990, the archipelago served as a testing ground for Soviet nuclear weapons with more than two hundred detonations.
The indigenous Nenets people established settlements on the islands in the 1870s, maintaining traditions of fishing, trapping, and reindeer herding.
The archipelago experiences extreme weather conditions with winter temperatures of minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 22 degrees Celsius) and summer temperatures reaching only 45 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius). Access to the region is heavily restricted and requires special permits from Russian authorities.
The most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated was tested here in October 1961 and reached a yield of fifty megatons. The shockwave from this explosion circled the Earth three times and shattered windows hundreds of miles away.
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