Franz Josef Land: the Pristine Russian Arctic

In the late 1800s, the North Pole was still a mystery. No one knew if there was land beneath the ice.

Many launched expeditions to reach the pole, but no one succeeded. Then, in 1873, the Tegetthoff expedition from Austria found previously unknown islands covered with glaciers and inhabited by polar bears. They named the archipelago Franz Josef Land,
in honor of the Austrian emperor. In 1926, the Soviet Union claimed the islands and closed access to foreign vessels.

In the summer of 2013, almost a century later, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Enric Sala led a National Geographic Pristine Seas Expedition with Blancpain to Franz Josef Land, where he and an international team of scientists and filmmakers explored the land and the underwater Arctic world.

Sala will narrate the story of this epic expedition and his work with Russian agencies to protect this unique ecosystem, in the next issue of Lettres du Brassus.