Sabine Island
Sabine Ø ( German " Sabine Island " ) is an uninhabited island off the east coast of Greenland. Administratively it belonged until 2008 to the province tunu ( " East Greenland " ), since 2009 the unincorporated area of the Northeast Greenland National Park.
Geography
Sabine Ø lies in the Greenland Sea, a few kilometers east of Wollaston Forland Peninsula. From this it is separated by the Clavering Road, from its eastern neighbor island Lille Pendulum ( Little Pendulum Island ) by Pendulum Street. Both islands, together with Bass Rock and Hvalrosø ( Walrus Island), the group of Pendulum Islands, which limit the Hochstetter bay south and the northern island Shannon are opposite.
From its northernmost point of Cape Neumayer (74 ° 41 'N, 18 ° 52' W74.678333333333 - 18,865 ) to Observatoriehalvø Peninsula (74 ° 32 'N, 18 ° 50' W74.533333333333 - 18.836666666667 ) in the south of the island has a expansion of 16 km, in east-west direction it is 14 km wide. Sabine Ø has an area of 156 km ². It is mountainous and reaches Keferstein a height of 699 m.
The surface of the island is characterized by rocks with basaltic rocks predominate. The vegetation is sparse and large land mammals such as musk ox rare. Marine mammals and birds, however, benefit from the Sirius Water Polynya, which usually ranges from the Shannon Island to Hvalrosø.
History
Sabine Ø was first inhabited by Paleo- Eskimos of the Independence I and later by Inuit of the Dorset and Thule culture for several thousand years. Especially in the southeast of the island fire places in the pre- Eskimos and remains of buildings are found that are attributable to the Thule culture. When the first Europeans entered the island, but they were already leaving.
The discovery of the Sabine Island by Europeans dating back to August 1823., The British Admiralty had in 1818 launched a program for the accurate determination of the earth's shape with the help of the seconds pendulum. Specially trained naval officers took on the British ships and led pendulum experiments in remote parts of the British Empire by. Among them was Edward Sabine, who later became President of the Royal Society. He had already in 1818 and from 1819 to 1820 accompanied the expeditions of John Ross and William Edward Parry to the discovery of the Northwest Passage. In 1823 he went on the HMS Griper under the command of Douglas Clavering to Hammerfest, Spitsbergen and the east coast of Greenland. After the Griper had passed the ice barrier of the East Greenland Current in the second week of August, she sailed northward and eventually went on August 15, 1823 Today's Germania port of Sabine Island at anchor, a place that is protected from compact drift through the upstream Walrus Island. Sabine turned his observatory on one of the observatories Peninsula ( Observatoriehalvø ).
1869-1870 wintered and the Second German North Polar Expedition with the screw steamer Germania Germania harbor, just before the place where Sabine had conducted his pendulum experiments. From here, undertook the expedition, led by Julius Payer, extended boat rides and dog sledding trips to the exploration and mapping of the adjacent coasts. The captain of the Germania and leader of the expedition, Carl Koldewey, gave the island, which was called by the British Heart Pendulum Iceland, its current name. Many other geographical names on Sabine Ø go back to Koldewey.
1926 visited the Cambridge East Greenland Expedition under the direction of James Wordie the island and repeated the pendulum experiments Sabines of 1823.
1942 ended up as part of the " company 's wooden eye " a German Wehrmacht unit in the Hansa Bay on the east coast of Sabine Ø. Here they operated a weather station, but was discovered in March 1943 by a Danish sledge patrol and involved in a fight. U.S. B-29 bombers destroyed the station on 25 May 1943.
As part of the GeoArk project, an interdisciplinary research project of the Danish National Museum and the Institute of Geography and Geology, University of Copenhagen, led by Bjarne Gronnow (* 1956) between 2003 and 2009 was repeatedly operated archaeological fieldwork in Germania harbor. The focus was on the excavation and investigation of sites in the Thule culture.