The abandoned ships, planes and houses of the bleak frozen wasteland of Tiksi

@ElentirENG ES 6·14·2024 · 23:32 0

The Arctic Ocean is a huge 14 million square km area of ​​water and ice that spans the Arctic Circle.

The icy abandoned streets of Vorkuta, the coldest and easternmost city in Europe
Akarmara, a beautiful ghost town that was built by German prisoners of World War II

To give us an idea, its area is more than three times the total area of ​​the European Union. Its waters bathe more than 45,000 kilometers of coasts of Russia, Finland, Norway, Greenland, Iceland, Canada and the United States. Russia's northernmost port, Tiksi, is on this ocean. That town was founded in 1933, during Stalin's dictatorship, as part of the project known as the Northern Sea Route, from New Zealand to the Bering Strait. During World War II, this port was used by Soviet Arctic convoys, a tough supply route that sought to avoid the action of German submarines.

Tiksi lived its greatest splendor during the Cold War. The Soviet Air Force established two air bases there, Tiksi North (abandoned in the 1960s) and Tiksi West, used by Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bombers and abandoned after the fall of the USSR. Furthermore, in the 1950s an airport was built in the northeast, which practically ceased to have operations in 2012, although it is occasionally used by the few flights that arrive there.

In 1989 Tiksi had more than 11,000 inhabitants, but from then on the population began to decrease, especially after the closure of the Tiski West air base. Today Tiksi has about 4,400 inhabitants, who endure average temperatures of up to -30ºC in winter (with extremes of up to -50ºC) and a long polar night that lasts from November 19 to 24 January. Tiksi is part of the Sakha Republic, an administrative division of Russia with an area of ​​more than 3 million square km (about six times the size of Spain), but with less than a million inhabitants.

A few days ago, the channel Ninurta published a video showing the boats, Tiksi's abandoned planes and houses. The video shows the extreme cold of that desolate frozen wasteland and its terrible effects:

You can see some screenshots of this icy video here. We start with the remains of a twin-engine Douglas DC-3 (or perhaps its Soviet version, the Lisunov Li-2).

One of the old ships trapped in ice in this port.

The hallways of a ship that is trapped in ice in Tiksi.

An Antonov An-12 transport plane abandoned in Tiksi. It is without engines and they have painted the signs that it had on its fuselage. From the paint it looks like one of the planes used by the Russian Air Force.

A crib and a baby chair in an abandoned apartment in Tiksi. This is what happens in that town if you leave a window open during the winter.