Kongsøya

Template: Infobox Island / Maintenance / image missing

Kongsøya (Eng. " King's Island ") is the largest of the three main islands of the König Karl country in the eastern part of Spitsbergen. Their size is 191 km ², its height up to 320 m above sea level. The highest mountain is the Retziusfjellet in the west of the island. Only slightly lower ( 304 m) is the Hårfagrehaugen at Cape Coburg. Kongsøya is under Norwegian administration.

History

During an expedition in 1890, led by the German zoologist Willy Kükenthal, this named the island after the Thuringian city of Jena. Kükenthal had studied in Jena and received his doctorate here in 1884. In 1897 the island was visited by a British expedition led by Arnold Pike and a year later, in 1898, by the German Helgoland expedition led the zoologist Fritz Fritz Schaudinn and Romans, which had been organized by Theodor Lerner.

1925 named the Norwegians around the island in Kongsøya. Since 1973 the entire island group is part of the Northeast Svalbard Nature Reserve.