Sannikov Land

Sannikov Land Земля Санникова
Reported location of Sannikov Land
Created by	First reported by Yakov Sannikov and Matvei Gedenschtrom
Type	Large phantom island
Notable locations	Arctic Ocean

Sannikov Land (Russian: Земля Санникова) was a phantom island in the Arctic Ocean. Its supposed existence became something of a myth in 19th-century Russia.

Yakov Sannikov and Matvei Gedenschtrom claimed to have seen it during their 1809–1810 cartographic expedition to the New Siberian Islands. Yakov Sannikov was the first one to report the sighting of a "new land" north of Kotelny Island in 1811 (hence, the name "Sannikov Land").

In 1886, a Baltic German explorer in Russian service, Baron Eduard Toll, reported observing the elusive land during an expedition to the New Siberian Islands. In August 1901, during another expedition led by Toll, The Russian Polar Expedition, Russian Arctic ship Zarya headed across the Laptev Sea, searching for the legendary Sannikov Land (Zemlya Sannikova) but was soon blocked by floating pack ice in the New Siberian Islands. During 1902 the attempts to reach Sannikov Land, deemed to be beyond the De Long Islands, continued while Zarya was trapped in fast ice. Leaving the ship, Russian Arctic explorer Eduard Toll and three companions vanished forever in November 1902 while travelling away from Bennett Island towards the south on loose ice floes.

A search by the Soviet icebreaker Sadko was announced in 1936 and carried out in 1937 but found no trace of the land.

Some historians and geographers, judging from other successes of Sannikov and the presence of shallow sand shoals at its mapped location, postulate that Sannikov Land indeed existed, but was destroyed by coastal erosion and became a submerged sand shoal like many other islands, formed either of fossilized ice or of permafrost. This process of disappearing of Arctic islands continues within the New Siberian Islands archipelago. Other historians and geographers hypothesize that Sannikov Land might have been a miraged image, which occur frequently in the Arctic region, of Bennett Island.