Sabine Ø

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Sabine Ø
Sabine Ø on a map from 1874
Sabine Ø on a map from 1874
Waters Greenland Sea
Archipelago Pendulum Islands
Geographical location 74 ° 36 ′  N , 18 ° 59 ′  W Coordinates: 74 ° 36 ′  N , 18 ° 59 ′  W
Sabine Ø (Greenland)
Sabine Ø
length 16 km
width 14 km
surface 156 km²
Highest elevation Keferstein
699  m
Residents uninhabited
On a map from 1977
On a map from 1977

Sabine Ø ( German  "Sabine Island" ) is an uninhabited island off the east coast of Greenland . Administratively, it belonged to the province of Tunu ("East Greenland") until the end of 2008 , and since 2009 to the non-parish area of the Northeast Greenland National Park .

geography

Sabine Ø is located in the Greenland Sea , just a few kilometers east of the Wollaston Forland peninsula . It is separated from this by the Clavering Street, from its eastern neighbor island Lille Pendulum (Small Pendulum Island) by the Pendulum Street. Together with Bass Rock and Hvalrosø (Walrus Island), both islands form the group of Pendulum Islands , which border Hochstetterbucht to the south and face the island of Shannon to the north .

From its northernmost point Cape Neumayer ( 74 ° 41 ′  N , 18 ° 52 ′  W ) to the peninsula Observatoriehalvø ( 74 ° 32 ′  N , 18 ° 50 ′  W ) in the south the island has an extension of 16 km, in the east In the west direction it is 14 km wide. Sabine Ø has an area of ​​156 km². It is mountainous and reaches a height of 699 m in the Keferstein.

The surface of the island is dominated by rocks, with basaltic rocks predominating. The plant cover is sparse and larger land mammals such as musk ox are rare. Marine mammals and birds , on the other hand, benefit from the Sirius Water Polynja , which usually extends from Shannon Island to Hvalrosø.

history

Ruins of Thule winter houses on Sabine Ø as Koldewey found them in 1869

Sabine Ø was settled for several thousand years, first by Paleo-Eskimos of Independence I and later by Inuit of the Dorset and Thule cultures . Especially in the southeast of the island there are pre-Eskimos campfires and remains of dwellings that can be attributed to the Thule culture. When the first Europeans set foot on the island, they were already deserted.

The discovery of Sabine Island by Europeans dates back to August 1823. In 1818 the British Admiralty had started a program to precisely determine the shape of the earth with the help of the pendulum seconds . Specially trained naval officers traveled on the British ships and carried out pendulum experiments in remote parts of the British Empire. Among them was Edward Sabine , who later became President of the Royal Society . He had already accompanied the expeditions of John Ross and William Edward Parry to the discovery of the Northwest Passage in 1818 and 1819–1820 . In 1823 he drove on the HMS Griper under the command of Douglas Clavering to Hammerfest , Spitzbergen and the east coast of Greenland. After the Griper had passed the ice barrier of the East Greenland Current in the second week of August, she sailed northwards and finally anchored on August 15, 1823 in today's Germaniahafen on Sabine Island, a place that is protected from compact drift ice by the offshore Walrus Island . Sabine set up his observatory on the observatory peninsula (Observatoriehalvø).

From 1869–1870 the Second German North Polar Expedition with the screw steamer Germania spent the winter in the Germaniahafen, right in front of the place where Sabine had carried out his pendulum tests. From here the expedition participants, above all Julius Payer , undertook long boat trips and dog sledding trips to explore and map the adjacent coasts. The captain of Germania and leader of the expedition, Carl Koldewey , gave the island, which the British called Inner Pendulum Island , its current name. Many other geographical names on Sabine Ø also go back to Koldewey.

In 1926 the Cambridge-East Greenland Expedition, led by James Wordie, visited the island and repeated Sabine's pendulum experiments from 1823.

In 1942 a German Wehrmacht unit landed in the Hansa Bay on the east coast of Sabine Ø as part of the “ Holzauge company ” . Here she operated a weather station , but was discovered on March 11, 1943 by a Danish sledge patrol and involved in a battle. American B-24 bombers destroyed the station on May 25, 1943.

As part of the GeoArk project, an interdisciplinary research project of the Danish National Museum and the Institute for Geography and Geology at the University of Copenhagen , archaeological field research was carried out several times between 2003 and 2009 in Germaniahafen under the direction of Bjarne Grønnow (* 1956) . The focus was on the excavation and research of sites of the Thule culture.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Per Ivar Haug: Gazetteer of Greenland ( Memento June 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) , Til Oppslysning . Volume 15. Universitetsbiblioteket i Trondheim, Trondheim 2005. ISBN 82-7113-114-1 (English)
  2. ↑ Keferstein . 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 , accessed December 28, 2013 (English)
  3. ↑ The second German North Pole voyage in 1869 and 1870 under the leadership of Captain Koldewey . Association for the German North Pole Trip in Bremen, second volume: Scientific results , Brockhaus, Leipzig 1875, p. 488
  4. ↑ Mariane Hardenberg: In search of Thule children: Construction of playing houses as a means of socializing children . In: Geografisk Tidsskrift - Danish Journal of Geography 110 (2), 2010, pp. 201–214 ( PDF; 2.7 MB ( Memento from February 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ))
  5. ↑ JBT Pedersen, LH Kaufmann, A. Kroon, BH Jakobsen: The Northeast Greenland Sirius Water Polynya dynamics and variability inferred from satellite imagery. ( Memento of February 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) In: Danish Journal of Geography 110, No. 2, 2010, pp. 131–142 (PDF; 3.5 MB; English).
  6. ↑ The GeoArk 2008 expedition to North East Greenland on the National Museum of Denmark website, accessed April 25, 2014
  7. ↑ The second German North Pole voyage in 1869 and 1870 under the leadership of Captain Koldewey . Association for the German North Pole Trip in Bremen, Volume 1, Brockhaus, Leipzig 1874, p. 616ff
  8. ↑ WJ Mills: Exploring Polar Frontiers - A Historical Encyclopedia , Vol. 1, ABC-CLIO, 2003. ISBN 1-57607-422-6 , p. 148f (English)
  9. ↑ Edward Sabine: An account of experiments to determine the figure of the earth by means of the pendulum vibrating seconds in different latitudes; as well as on various other subjects of philosophical inquiry . John Murray, London 1825, pp. 159ff
  10. ↑ 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. 34 (English)
  11. ↑ Hansa Bugt . 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 , accessed December 28, 2013 (English)
  12. ↑ The GeoArk Project 2003–2009 on the National Museum of Denmark website, accessed April 25, 2014