Kirov Islands

The Kirov Islands, also called the Sergey Kirov Islands, are an Arctic archipelago in the Kara Sea belonging to Russia's Krasnoyarsk Krai, about 140 kilometers from the Siberian coast and 100 kilometers northwest of the Nordenskiold Archipelago. The group consists of eight small, low lying islands covering 280 square kilometers of tundra, sandy spits and lagoons, with the largest island, Isachenko, covering 180.6 square kilometers and holding the archipelago's highest point at 57 meters. The islands were discovered in 1930 by the icebreaker Georgiy Sedov during an expedition led by Otto Yulievich Schmidt and Vladimir Yulievich Wiese, and were named for the Soviet politician Sergey Kirov. A Soviet weather station operated on Isachenko from 1954 to 1994, and the archipelago now lies within the Great Arctic State Nature Reserve, Russia's largest protected natural area, uninhabited and seasonally ice bound.