Lena River
The great river of eastern Siberia, frozen highway to the Arctic
The Lena is the easternmost of the three great Siberian rivers and the largest river in the world whose course lies entirely within permafrost. Rising in the mountains beside Lake Baikal, it flows north across an immense, sparsely peopled landscape to a delta on the Arctic Ocean that is one of the biggest and most pristine wetlands on Earth. For half the year it is locked in ice — when it breaks up in spring it can produce floods on a continental scale.
The Lena runs about 4,400 kilometers from the Baikal Mountains to the Laptev Sea, ranking among the longest rivers on the planet. Near the city of Yakutsk, the coldest large city anywhere, it spreads into a valley several kilometers wide. Upstream it passes the Lena Pillars, a wall of dramatic stone columns rising from the bank. At its mouth the river fans into a delta some 400 kilometers across, a maze of frozen channels and tundra that thaws briefly each summer into a haven for migratory birds before merging with the Arctic Ocean.
The river has been the main route into the Sakha (Yakutia) region for centuries, carrying fur traders, exiles and, in the Soviet era, the supplies that built remote settlements — there are almost no roads, so summer barges and winter ice roads do the work instead. Lenin is sometimes said to have taken his pseudonym from the river. Today the Lena and its frozen delta sit on the front line of Arctic warming, as thawing permafrost releases carbon and reshapes a landscape that has been frozen for ages.