Mona Islands

The Mona Islands (Russian: Острова Мона) is a group of a few scattered small islands covered with tundra vegetation. They are located in the Kara Sea, about 30 km north of the western coast of the Taymyr Peninsula in Siberia, Russia.

The sea surrounding the Mona Islands is covered with pack ice in the winter, which is long and bitter. There are numerous ice floes even in the summer. Kravkov Island (Остров Кравкова) is one of the biggest islands, but it is still only about 3 km square.

Small Gerkules Island (Остров Геркулес), located in the middle of the group, is named after lost explorer Vladimir Rusanov's ship.

Ringnes Island (Остров Рингнес) located at the western end of the group, was named after the Norwegian Ringnes brewery that financed Otto Sverdrup's Arctic expeditions. Other islands are called Granitnyy (Остров Гранитный) and Krainiy (Остров Крайний).

The Mona Islands were named by Fridtjof Nansen after Henrik Mohn, a Norwegian meteorologist. Mohn worked out and published the meteorological observations of various polar expeditions, including those of Nansen in the "Fram" (1893-6). "Mona" is a genitive case in Russian, meaning "(islands) of Mon" and this name has stuck, especially since the Germans used ("Mona Inseln"), based on the Russian version of the name, during their campaigns in World War II. Since then "Mona Islands" has become popular and its use has been widespread in this manner for many decades and in many modern maps and atlases. "Mohn Islands", which would be the grammatically correct way of naming these islands in English, is so rare that there are practically no maps now where the name "Mona" is not used.

This island group belongs to the Krasnoyarsk Krai administrative division of the Russian Federation.