A team of Russian scientists has concluded a grueling four-month expedition on Medny Island, a remote and uninhabited outpost in the Commander Islands archipelago, situated in the Bering Sea near Russia’s maritime border with the United States. The mission highlights Moscow’s continued scientific and environmental focus on its strategic territories in the North Pacific.
Braving severe weather and extreme isolation, the specialists from the “Commander Islands” National Park have been on the island since mid-May. Their work involved extensive scientific monitoring, collecting ecological data, and building basic infrastructure. A key part of their mission was conservation work, including setting up feeding stations for the unique Medny Island Arctic fox, a critically endangered subspecies found nowhere else on Earth.
Medny, translating to ‘Copper Island,’ has a poignant history that belies its current desolation. It was once home to a settlement of Aleut people, who were relocated from the Aleutian Islands in the 19th century. However, in a stark Soviet-era decision, the entire village of Preobrazhenskoye was closed in the late 1960s, and all residents were forcibly relocated to the neighboring Bering Island, leaving Medny a ghost island.
The island’s recent history is also marked by tragedy. Until the early 2000s, it hosted a Russian border guard post. The outpost was permanently closed after a catastrophic event in 2001, when a powerful storm wave swept eight border guards into the frigid ocean. This incident sealed the island’s fate as a place deemed too hazardous for permanent human presence.
With no regular connection to the mainland, the scientific team’s departure was made possible by a private yacht chartered by a conservation foundation. As the scientists depart, Medny Island returns to its silence, a starkly beautiful natural laboratory and a somber monument to the human histories of settlement, forced migration, and military retreat on this remote edge of the world.