Champ Island

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Champ Island
Map of the Franz Josef Land
Map of the Franz Josef Land
Waters Arctic Ocean
Archipelago Franz Josef Land
Geographical location 80 ° 41 ′  N , 56 ° 21 ′  E Coordinates: 80 ° 41 ′  N , 56 ° 21 ′  E
Champ Island (Franz Josef Land)
Champ Island
length 27 km
width 18 km
surface 374.3 km²
Highest elevation 507  m
Residents uninhabited
Champ Island on a satellite photo (bottom left)
Champ Island on a satellite photo (bottom left)

The Champ Island ( Russian Чамп , Tschamp ) is an uninhabited island in the arctic Franz Josef Land, which belongs to Russia .

geography

Champ Island

The 374 km² Champ Island is centrally located in the Franz Josef Land archipelago . It is the southernmost of a group of islands that are only separated from each other by narrow straits that are frozen almost all year round and were initially regarded as a contiguous land mass, Zichy Land . From the northern Salisbury Island , the Champ Island is separated only by the few hundred meters wide Pondorff-Enge, from the Luigi Island in the north-west by the Cook Strait. The Champ Island is heavily glaciated . More than 50% of its coastline consists of glacier edges.

A geological peculiarity are the numerous concretions - stones that have formed around a central fossil . You can find them especially on the capes of the south coast, Cape Fiume and Cape Trieste. They come from the Upper Triassic and are often perfectly spherical with a diameter of up to three meters.

There are some colonies of sea ​​birds on the south and west coasts . Kittiwakes and crab grebes breed here most often .

history

The southeast coast of the island between Cape Fiume and Cape Trieste was mapped in 1874 by the Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition (1872–1874) as part of Zichy Land , which was named after Count Ödön Zichy (1811–1894), one of the main sponsors of the expedition . It was not until the Fiala-Ziegler Expedition (1903–1905) that the island was identified as having a distinct character. Anthony Fiala (1869–1950) named it after William S. Champ, who saved the men in distress in 1905.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Friedhelm Thiedig: Journey to the Geographical North Pole and Franz Josef Land (2005) - with a description of the Klagenfurt Islands and the strikingly large stone spheres east of Cape Fiume on Champ Island (FJL). In: Carinthia II . 196/116 Volume, Klagenfurt 2006, pp. 9–32 ( PDF (11.2 MB) on ZOBODAT ).
  2. ↑ Meredith Williams, Julian A. Dowdeswell: Mapping seabird nesting habitats in Franz Josef Land, Russian High Arctic, using digital Landsat Thematic Mapper imagery . In: Polar Research . Volume 17, 1998, pp. 15-30 (English). doi : 10.3402 / polar.v17i1.6604 .
  3. ^ Anthony Fiala: Fighting the Polar Ice . Doubleday, Page & Co., New York 1907, p. 193 .

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