Zapovednik Wrangel Island

Wrangel Island lies far north of the Arctic Circle and covers 7,608 km² of mostly mountainous ground. It escaped glaciation during the Quaternary ice ages, which is why its wildlife is unusually varied for the high Arctic. The island is generally accepted as home to the last woolly mammoths, which radiocarbon dates show surviving until about 4,000 years ago. Chertov Ovrag on the south coast, a Paleo-Eskimo hunting camp about 3,600 years old, is the earliest known human trace.

The island is named after Baron Ferdinand von Wrangel, who searched for it in vain in 1820 to 1824. In 1881 a party from the US revenue cutter Corwin landed and claimed it for the United States, and in 1921 Vilhjalmur Stefansson sent five settlers to claim it for Canada; when rescuers arrived in 1923, the Iñupiat seamstress Ada Blackjack was the only survivor. The Soviet Union removed the remaining Americans and Inuit in 1924 and reaffirmed its claim in 1926.

A Russian government resolution of 23 March 1976 made the island a strict nature reserve, a zapovednik. It has 417 recorded species and subspecies of vascular plants, 23 of them endemic, gatherings of up to 100,000 Pacific walruses, and the world's highest density of ancestral polar bear dens. UNESCO listed it together with neighbouring Herald Island in 2004.