Punuk Islands

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Punuk Islands
Map of St. Lawrence Island with the Punuk Islands (bottom right)
Map of St. Lawrence Island with the Punuk Islands (bottom right)
Waters Bering Sea
Geographical location 63 ° 4 ′  N , 168 ° 49 ′  W Coordinates: 63 ° 4 ′  N , 168 ° 49 ′  W
Punuk Islands (Alaska)
Punuk Islands
Number of islands 3
Main island North Punuk Island
Total land area 0.4 km²
Residents uninhabited

The Punuk Islands are a group of islands in the Bering Sea off the coast of St. Lawrence Island in the southeast. Administratively it belongs to the US state of Alaska .

geography

The three islands, which together only have an area of ​​about 40 hectares, are eight kilometers south-southeast of Apavawook Cape. They form a three kilometer long chain running from southwest to northeast and are named South Punuk, Middle Punuk and North Punuk Island because of their geographical location. The relatively flat islands are nowhere 100 m high.

Flora and fauna

The bottom of the islands is thickly overgrown with grass and moss, even on the steepest slopes. The beaches are visited by walruses in large numbers, of which numerous, especially young, are regularly crushed by their conspecifics, which has led to the deposition of walrus ivory . There are arctic foxes in small numbers and sea birds such as eiders , alken birds , guillemots , puffins and cormorants .

history

When the Russian hydrograph Michail Tebenkow first mapped the islands in 1849, the North Island was populated by Eskimos . In the harsh winter from 1879 to 1880, however, like almost the entire population of St. Lawrence Island, they died of hunger and disease. After that, the islands were only visited to hunt walruses in summer and to collect ivory. At the beginning of the 1930s, the German-American archaeologist Otto Geist (1889–1963) investigated a site of the Okvik culture.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Punuk Islands at Alaska Guide Co. (English).
  2. ↑ a b c d Froelich G. Rainey : Eskimo prehistory: the Okvik site on the Punuk Islands . In: Anthropological papers of the American Museum of Natural History . Volume 37, No. 4, 1941, pp. 453-569 (English).
  3. ^ Francis H. Fay, Brendan P. Kelly: Mass Natural Mortality of Walruses (Odobenus rosrnarus) at St. Lawrence Island, Bering Sea, Autumn 1978 (PDF; 2.1 MB). In: Arctic . Volume 33, No. 2, 1980, pp. 226-245 (English).

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