This Frozen Russian Island Is the World's Biggest Jigsaw Puzzle
For a small period of time, the remote New Siberian Islands turn into a jigsaw puzzle of fractured ice, as seen in this NASA image captured by the Landsat 8 satellite. The islands are typically completely blanketed in snow for most of the year.
(Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview)
Chilling between the Arctic Ocean and Siberia's frigid northern seas, the cluster of rocks known as the New Siberian Islands is so cold and remote that they were once believed to be made entirely of woolly mammoth bones. (They're not, but there are still plenty of mammoth fossils to be found.)
Viewed on foot, the islands are a near-uninhabited canvas of tundra covered in snow roughly three-quarters of the year. But seen from the sky, as in an epic satellite image posted by NASA Earth Observatory on Dec. 1, the bleak islands look entirely different. [The Frozen North: Stunning Images of Russia From Above]
