phantom island in the Arctic Ocean
Sannikov Land
Sannikov Land is a phantom island in the Arctic Ocean whose supposed existence became something of a myth in nineteenth-century Russia. Its repeated and fruitless searches have made it one of the most famous enigmas of Russian polar exploration.
The myth
The story begins with the 1809–1810 cartographic expedition of Yakov Sannikov and Matvei Gedenschtrom to the New Siberian Islands. Sannikov was the first to report, in 1811, a sighting of a "new land" north of Kotelny Island, which gave the place its name.
In 1886 the Baltic German explorer Eduard Toll claimed to have glimpsed the elusive land too. In 1901, during the Russian Polar Expedition he led, the ship Zarya tried to reach it by crossing the Laptev Sea, but pack ice trapped her among the New Siberian Islands. The following year she was still stuck in the ice. In November 1902 Toll and three companions left the ship and travelled south on loose ice floes, and they vanished forever.
A later search found no trace of the land, and it was concluded that it did not exist. Some scholars think it once existed and was destroyed by coastal erosion, while others suggest it was a mirage of Bennett Island, a phenomenon common in the Arctic.
Legacy
The geologist and science fiction writer Vladimir Obruchev made it the setting of his novel Sannikov Land (1926). In the book, the island shelters a tribe of Onkilons and Neanderthals, and its volcano ends up destroying it. In 1973 a science fiction film with the same title was released in the Soviet Union. It also appears in the British horror podcast The Magnus Archives, where it is described as a place that has never existed.