Jan Mayen
From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jan Mayen is an island in the Arctic Ocean. It belongs to Norway. It is 373 km2 in size. A big part of the island is an active volcano, the Beerenberg, which is 2.277m high. The island lies 600km north of Iceland, 500km east of Greenland and 1000km west of the Norwegian mainland.
There is a radio station and a meteorological station on the island. Except for the people that operate these stations, the island is uninhabited (no one else lives there).
[edit] History
The first certain discovery of the island is from 1614. There are earlier claims and possible discoveries, even as early as the early 6th century. The island is named after the Dutchman Jan Jacobs May van Schellinkhout who visited the island in 1614. His first mate (a first mate is the assistant to a ship's captain) did some mapping of the coast and named the island Jan Mayen.
It is assumed that Henry Hudson discovered the island in 1607 and called it Hudson's Tutches or Touches. Thereafter it was seen several times by navigators who claimed its discovery and renamed it. Thus, in 1611 or the following year whalers from Hull named it Trinity Island; in 1612 Jean Vrolicq, a French whaler, called it Île de Richelieu; and in 1614 English captain John Clarke named it Isabella.
The island is inhabited by people operating a Long Range Navigation (Loran-C) base with a staff of 14 and a weather services station with a staff of four. The staff members of both stations live in Olonkinbyen (English: Olonkin City), as the places people live by the Loran-C base are called. The island has no native people living on it, but is given the ISO 3166-1 country code SJ, the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) .no (.sj is allocated but not used) and data code JN. Its amateur radio call sign prefix is JX.
[edit] External links
- Satellite Radar image of Jan Mayen
- Photographs and information on Jan Mayen
- Jan Mayen crew
- LORAN-C mast Jan Mayen
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