MURMANSK, September 12. /TASS/. The Northern Fleet’s expedition confirmed a new island and a new strait on the Franz Josef Land Archipelago. Formerly that territory was considered to be a peninsula, and nothing was known about a strait there, the fleet’s press service told TASS.

"The glacier, which connected the island and the mainland, has thawed away," the press service said. "The strait used to be covered with snow and ice, and nobody could see it."

"The new objects have been put on the maps and information about them will be presented to sailors, and later on all official maps will be updated," the fleet said. "This is not the first discovery of the kind in the current season."

The expedition confirmed formation of a new island instead of the Littrow Peninsula of the Hall Island. According to the press service, the Northern Fleet’s expedition passed the newly formed strait from the Bay of Surovaya into the Gulf of Hydrographs; measured the depths, and registered direction and speed of the water flow in the strait.

The Littrow Cape was discovered in March 1874 by Austrian-Hungarian arctic explorer Julius von Payer. It was named after Austria’s astronomer Joseph Johann von Littrow, who was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Though Walter Wellman’s expedition in 1898-1999 and Anthony Fial’s expedition in 1903-1905 put on maps the Littrow Island, for many years there has been an opinion that that part of land is a peninsula on the Hall Island.

Back in 2006, the Moscow State University of Geodesy and Cartography used new satellite methods of the Earth’s distanced probing to say about an island and a strait in the point, where all marine and topography maps showed a peninsula.

145 years after that land was discovered, the Northern Fleet and the Russian Geographic Society proved finally an unnamed strait of about 500 meters wide and the Littrow Island of about 200 square kilometers.