Shelonsky Islands

File:Siberia YB.png

Location of the Shelonsky Islands in the Laptev Sea.

File:Yana bay1.png

The Shelonsky Islands and adjacent islands.

The Shelonsky Islands (Russian: Шелонские острова, Shelonskiye Ostrova) is an island group in the Laptev Sea. It is located in the coastal lowlands of the Yana Bay, east of the mouths of the Yana river.

The Shelonsky Islands are marshy and flat.

• The largest is Vostochnyy Shelonsky, it is located on the northern shores of the Manyko Peninsula (Poluostrov Manyko). This island has a length of 17 km and a maximum width of 7.2 km. Vostochnyy has many small lakes and becomes narrower towards its eastern end. East of this island lies a deep inlet stretching southwards known in Russian as Sellyakhskaya Guba.
• Zapadnyy Shelonsky Island is much smaller, being only 2.5 km across. It lies off Vostochnyy's western tip, separated from it by a 2 km wide sound.
• Yuzhnyy Shelonsky lies detached from the main group, 20 km further to the west, off the NE shores of Yarok Island. It is 3 km long and 0.7 km wide.
• There are a few other islands in the group, all of them close to Vostochnyy, but they seem to have no name.

The Yana delta, the coastal area off which these islands lie, is an extensive wetland zone. It is subject to severe Arctic weather with frequent gales and blizzards. Further north, the sea in the Yana Bay is frozen with thick ice for about eight months yearly, so that these coastal islands are merged with the mainland most of the year.

Administratively the Shelonsky group belongs to the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) of the Russian Federation.

References

• Permafrost and formation of thermokarst lakes