Little Diomede Island
Little Diomede Island or Yesterday Island is an inhabited island of Alaska. It is the smaller of the two Diomede Islands located in the Bering Strait between the Alaskan mainland and Siberia. The island has one town, also called Diomede.
Etymology
The Diomede Islands are named after Saint Diomedes. The Inupiaq name Iŋaliq means "the other one" or "the one over there". The two islands are respectively nicknamed "Yesterday Island" and "Tomorrow Island" because the International Date Line runs between them, making the date on Little Diomede Island always one day behind the date on Big Diomede Island.Geography
Little Diomede Island is located about west of mainland Alaska, in the middle of the Bering Strait. It is only from the International Date Line and about from the Russian island of Big Diomede. According to the United States Census Bureau, the island has a total area of, all of it land. On the western shore of the island is the village of Diomede, also known as Iŋaliq. The highest point on Little Diomede Island is . The island has very scant vegetation.Big Diomede is within the view of Little Diomede, meaning Russia can be seen from Alaska.
Geology
Little Diomede island is composed of Cretaceous age granite or quartz monzonite. The location of the settlement is the only area which does not have near-vertical cliffs to the water. Behind the settlement, and around the entire island, rocky slopes rise at about 40° up to the relatively flattened top in. The island has scant vegetation.Important Bird Area
The island, along with its surrounding waters, has been designated an Important Bird Area by BirdLife International because of its significant seabird colonies, including those of black-legged kittiwakes, and of parakeet, least and crested auklets.Climate
Summer temperatures average. Winter temperatures average from. Annual precipitation averages, and annual snowfall averages. During summer months, cloudy skies and fog prevail. Winds blow consistently from the north, averaging, with gusts of. The Bering Strait is generally frozen between mid-December and mid-June.Although slightly south of the Arctic Circle, the island has a dry-summer polar climate, because the driest high-sun month has less than one-third as much precipitation as the wettest high-sun month. The winters are icy and cold – colder than those of Nome despite the island location due to greater proximity to extremely cold Siberian air masses. The extreme moderating effect of the thawed Bering Sea produces very cool summers, with the result that most plants are unable to grow. The hottest summer ever experienced temperatures up to only.
History
Danish-Russian navigator Vitus Bering sighted the Diomede Islands on August 16, 1728, the day on which the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the memory of Diomedes of Tarsus.Little Diomede was sold to the United States by the Russian Empire, along with the rest of Alaska, in 1867. Inuit from Big and Little Diomede continued to cross between the two islands until the Soviet Union closed the border between in 1948. This section of the border between the United States and the Soviet Union became known as the "Ice Curtain" during the Cold War.
The Inuit of Big Diomede were resettled in coastal villages of Chukotka. There has been limited subsequent contact between the communities. There were sporadic contacts during the 1970s with former inhabitants of Big Diomede who walked across the Bering Strait to trade and exchange information across the International Date Line.
Lynne Cox swam from Little Diomede to Big Diomede in August 1987, she was congratulated jointly by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan. Visits by the inhabitants of Little Diomede to find relatives deported from Big Diomede resumed during Perestroika. There were subsequent exchanges during the 1990s. These have become increasingly rare as relations between the United States and Russia have worsened.