Severnaya Zemlya: The Last Major Landmass Mapped

Severnaya Zemlya — Russian Северная Земля, literally "Northern Land" — is an Arctic archipelago off the northern coast of Siberia, separating the Kara Sea from the Laptev Sea. It is widely cited as the last major landmass on Earth to be added to world maps. The archipelago was discovered on September 2, 1913 by the Boris Vilkitsky expedition, sailing the icebreakers Taimyr and Vaigach as part of the Imperial Russian Hydrographic Expedition of the Arctic Ocean. The group was not actually charted in detail until a Soviet expedition in 1930–1932, nearly two decades after first sighting, owing to the extreme difficulty of operating in the High Arctic. The four main islands and surrounding minor islands total roughly 37,000 square kilometres — larger than the U.S. state of Massachusetts (about 27,000 km²) and comparable in area to small European countries. The terrain is dominated by glaciers, ice caps and polar desert, with no permanent civilian population; only Russian military and meteorological personnel are stationed there. The late-discovery date is striking given that by 1913 the entire interiors of Africa and South America had been crossed by European expeditions, the South Pole had been reached, and aerial photography was emerging — but the Russian Arctic remained genuinely uncharted territory until well into the twentieth century. English speakers sometimes mispronounce the name (Jon Bois renders it as "Seania" in his Secret Base documentary on the telegraph).