Fata Morgana Land

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Fata Morgana Land is a phantom island in the Greenland Sea . Several sightings at the beginning of the 20th century could ultimately not be confirmed.

During the Danmark expedition, Johan Peter Koch and Aage Bertelsen and their Greenland sledge driver Tobias Gabrielsen (1878–1945) went on a dog sled trip to Pearyland , past Nordostrundingen , the most easterly point of Greenland. On May 2, 1907, they thought they were seeing land in a northeastern direction. They tried to get there, but the ice conditions were so difficult that they had to turn back. In the meantime the supposed island had disappeared from her eyes.

The assumption that there might still be unknown land between Greenland and Svalbard was renewed in the 1930s when the Danish polar explorers Lauge Koch (1933) and Peter Freuchen (1935) as well as the Soviet North Pole 1 expedition (1937) reported seeing the island. Ivan Papanin's sighting led Lauge Koch to undertake reconnaissance flights over the Greenland Sea in 1938. He carried out two flights with a Dornier whale , which took him from the Kongsfjord in Spitzbergens on May 10, 1938 to the Crown Prince Christian Land and on 15/16. May led to Pearyland. On both flights he crossed the sea area in which Fata Morgana land was expected, but without being able to discover it. The supposed sightings of the hypothetical island were also an essential motivation for the Mørkefjord expedition undertaken by Eigil Knuth , Ebbe Munck and Alf Trolle (1879-1949) from 1938 to 1939 .

It was a surprise when in 1993 the German research vessel Polarstern actually discovered a hitherto unknown island around 80 km off the coast of northeast Greenland. Gereon Budéus from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven landed with the helicopter on their ice cap . Given its location, about 240 km south of Nordostrundingen, it cannot be the island seen by Koch, Bertelsen and Gabrielsen. Nevertheless, it was named in honor of the latter Tobias Island ( Greenlandic Tuppiap Qeqertaa ).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ G. Amdrup : Report on the Danmark Expedition to the North-East Coast of Greenland 1906-1908 . In: Meddelelser om Grønland 41, 1913, p. 124 (English)
  2. ↑ Fata Morgana Lands . In: Anthony K. Higgins: Exploration history and place names of northern East Greenland. (= Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland Bulletin 21, 2010). Copenhagen 2010, ISBN 978-87-7871-292-9 (English), accessed June 14, 2017
  3. ↑ a b Anthony K. Higgins: Exploration history of northern East Greenland (PDF; 2.9 MB). In: Exploration history and place names of northern East Greenland (= Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland Bulletin 21, 2010), ISBN 978-87-7871-292-9 . P. 49 (English)
  4. ↑ Ole Bennike, Naja Mikkelsen, Rene Forsberg: Tobias Ø . In: Tidsskriftet Grønland year 57, No. 1/2009, pp. 18-25 (Danish)