Saunders Island (Greenland)
| Saunders Island | ||
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| Waters | Baffin Bay | |
| Geographical location | 76 ° 34 ′ N , 69 ° 45 ′ W | |
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| length | 15.3 km | |
| width | 7.6 km | |
| surface | 103 km² | |
| Highest elevation | 380 m | |
| Residents | uninhabited | |
The Saunders Island ( Danish Saunders Ø , Inuktun Agpat , Greenlandic Appat is) an island in northwest Greenland. It belongs administratively to the district of Qaanaaq in the northernmost part of the Avannaata Kommunia .
geography
The uninhabited island is 18 km west of the US Thule Air Base between Wolstenholme Island, ten kilometers southwest, and the small Manson Islands in the northeast. It is 15 kilometers long and about half as wide. Their area is 103 km². The interior of the island consists of a plateau up to 380 meters high, which drops steeply towards the sea. In the east and south-west there are small, flat scree beaches at the foot of the cliff .
Geologically, the Saunders Island is formed by the Narsaarsuk Formation, a cyclical sequence of layers of red sandstone , gray, coarsely crystalline dolomite and fine-grained dolomite.
fauna
There are breeding colonies of seabirds on the northwest coast , which is why the island is designated as an Important Bird Area (GL008) by BirdLife International . In 1983 the population of the thick-billed mum was estimated at 143,000 breeding pairs. Also represented are the fulmar , the kittiwake , the black guillemot and the puffin .
history
The island is named after James Saunders, the captain of the English corvette North Star , who was trapped here in pack ice for 62 days in 1848 . At the height of Greenland's whaling , the island was used as a supply post by seal hunters and whalers. The polar skimos also had their winter hunting grounds here. Your name for the island ( Agpat = "Lumme") is derived from the birds that breed there.
In 1903/1904 the Danish literary expedition , led by Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, spent the winter on Appat. Their aim was the ethnographic and artistic description of the life of the polar Skimos. Other participants were Knud Rasmussen , Harald Moltke and Jørgen Brønlund .
On January 21, 1968 crashed a B-52 bomber of the United States Air Force on the ice between the Thule Air Base and Saunders Island and exploded. Plutonium from the four hydrogen bombs carried along was released and contaminated an ice surface of twelve hectares and the sea floor, as the explosion had blasted a 2500 m² hole in the 60 cm thick ice. Ten years later, 239,240 Pu could be detected on the Saunders and Wolstenholme islands.
Web links
- Rasmus Ole Rasmussen: Saunders Ø . In: Store norske leksikon (Norwegian)
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Per Ivar Haug: Gazetteer of Greenland . (= Til Opplysning 15), Trondheim 2005, ISBN 82-7113-114-1 (English)
- ↑ Sailing Directions (enroute): Greenland and Iceland (PDF; 5.4 MB), Pub. 181, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Springfield, Virginia, 2010, p. 85
- ↑ Vincent E. Kurtz, DB Wales: Geology of the Thule Area, Greenland (PDF; 592 kB). In: Proceedings of Oklahoma Academy of Science 31, 1950, pp. 83-92 (English)
- ↑ a b Saunders Island at www.birdLife.org, accessed on January 2, 2014 (English)
- ^ Richard Vaughan: Birds of the Thule District, Northwest Greenland (PDF; 793 kB). In: Arctic 41 (1), 1988, pp. 53–58 (English)
- ^ Jean-Noël Malaurie : Myth of the North Pole. 200 years of expedition history. in: National Geographic .
- ^ Erich von Drygalski : Greenland expedition of the Society for Geography in Berlin 1891-1893 , Vol. 2, WH Kühl, Berlin 1897, p.49
- ↑ Den Litterære Ekspedition . In: The Store Danske Encyklopædi , accessed January 5, 2014 (Danish)
- ↑ Mats Eriksson: On Weapons Plutonium in the Arctic Environment (Thule, Greenland) (PDF; 1.99 MB), dissertation, Lund University, 2002 (English)
- ^ Wayne C. Hanson: Transuranic Elements in Arctic Tundra Ecosystems . In: Wayne C. Hanson (Ed.): Transuranic Elements in the Environment , US Department of Energy, 1980, ISBN 0-87079-119-2 , pp. 441–458 (English)