Shah-i-Zinda Mausoleum in Samarkand. Vasily Vereshchagin, 1869.
The Wrath of the Seas. Ivan Aivazovsky, 1886.
The Siberian city ofYakutsk, in the Russian Far East, is unfathomably cold, yet home to over a quarter million people:
Yakutsk has an average annual temperature of 17.6 °F winter high temperatures consistently well below −4 °F, and a record low of −−83.9 °F. As a result, Yakutsk is the coldest major city in the world
**Bell Island, **part of the Franz Josef Land archipelago in Russia.
I couldn’t believe this:
The island was the first among the Franz Josef archipelago to be visited by Benjamin Leigh Smith in his 1880 expedition. In his second expedition to the islands in 1881, Smith built a wooden lodge on the north side of the island which he used to winter. The lodge stands to this day.
A small wooden shack, built on an island in the Arctic Ocean, stands for 150 years. Will think about that next time I’m building something.
I linked a couple weeks ago to Stephen Kotkin’s discussion with Lex Fridman. That was so interesting to me I went out looking for other interviews and lectures of his on YouTube and found this great one from Dartmouth in 2017, the centennial of of the Russian Revolution.
Excellent top comment on YouTube:
The Joe Pesci of historians!
Stephen Kotkin is a historian that has studied and written mostly about Soviet history and Josef Stalin. This was an excellent interview with him by Lex Fridman — Lex asks simple, broad questions and let’s Kotkin go deep.
Kotkin is incredibly articulate here. I would love to get to a depth of knowledge on a subject to be able to speak uninterrupted about it for an hour and a half.
This one cropped up through Google’s Earth View Chrome extension.
The Tes River runs east to west into northwest Mongolia from the Sayan Mountains in Siberia.
It empties into the Uvs Nuur Basin, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The river’s floodplain looks amazing from the air, a 10+ mile wide swath with dozens of smaller streams formed as the main course has meandered all over and stranded oxbows and dropped bands of sediment.
Tes River :: 50°34' N, 93°39' E
This striking image shows sediment flow from the Kolyma, a 1,300 mile braided river that originates in the mountains of Eastern Siberia.
For about eight months of the year, the Kolyma River is frozen to depths of several meters. But every June, the river thaws and carries vast amounts of suspended sediment and organic material into the Arctic Ocean. That surge of fresh, soil-ridden waters colors the Kolyma Gulf (Kolymskiy Zaliv) dark brown and black.
Nearby to the west you can see a pockmarked landscape of hundreds of glacial lakes that the river winds around. An amazing-looking landscape, but of course for 8-10 months out of the year looks much different — frozen beneath ice and snow. Remote, desolate places like this showcase how much impact ice and water can have on shaping the land.