Wrangel Island is a remote island, close to the arctic, that belongs to Russia. Some seasonal residents come to the island to hunt and survey the area, but there is only one permanent resident on the island. During its peak, there could be as many as 150 people on the island at any given time.
Wrangel island is an island in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, which is located in the Russian Federation. Its size closely resembles the island of Crete and is considered the 91st largest island in the world. It is situated in the Arctic Ocean and has the internal date line displaced eastwards to avoid the island. This also keeps the island on the same day as the rest of the Russian Federation.
Most of Wrangel Island and its neighbor, Herald Island, is a federally protected sanctuary which is administered by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of Russia. The islands and their waters have been classified as a strict nature reserve since 1976. This means that they receive one of the highest levels of protection and exclude almost all human activity other than scientific purposes. The regional government of Chukotka extended the protected area of the maritime waters in 1999. As of 2003, four rangers are inhabiting the island year-round, and there are 12 scientists that come to the island during summer for research purposes.
Wrangel island was first thought to have been sighted in 1764 when a cossack, Sergent Stepan Andreyev, claimed to have first taken sight of the island. He first called it Tikegen Land, as he had found evidence of the local inhabitants of the island, the Krahay people. The name of the island was eventually changed to take the namesake of Baron Ferdinand von Wrangel, who sailed to the island's coordinates after hearing Chukchi stories of the land. Wrangel reportedly did not end up finding the island.
Throughout the next century, there were various British and American expeditions to the island. Eventually, the Tsarist government of Russia declared the island part of their government in 1916. It has since belonged to the territory of Russia, persisting past the next successor: the soviet union.
The island is of critical importance for scientific study, as there are various flora and fauna species found on this remote arctic island. Perhaps the most notable thing that the island is known for connects itself with the existence of the Woolley mammoths. The island is said to have been the final resting place of the Woolley mammoth, which remained there as an isolated population when the majority of the herds had died out. The final Woolley mammoth is said to have perished near 2000BC.
Before this discovery, it was believed that a dwarf variant of the mammoth originated in the region of Siberia, but after further research, it originated from this island.