Cold war sites on Arctic cruise
Aurora Expeditions members at Bukhta Legzdina in the Russian Arctic. Picture: Dylan Coker
A POLAR bear clambering a cliff face hunting eggs; 24-hour daylight; glaciers mirrored in seas next to fields of flowers … weird and wonderful things happen in the Arctic Circle.
In these cold reaches Novaya Zemlya is a little-known Russian outcrop of two main islands jutting 1000km in a crescent dividing the Barents and Kara seas. It has been off limits for decades and remains difficult to reach.
In the Cold War, it was a nuclear testing site where in 1961 the Russians exploded Tsar Bomba , the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. Tests later went underground, with blasts registering up to 6.9 on the Richter scale.
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