Yenisei
The mightiest river to reach the Arctic, splitting Siberia in two
The Yenisei pours more fresh water into the Arctic Ocean than any other river, draining a stretch of Siberia so vast it forms the natural boundary between the western plains and the central plateau. From headwaters in the mountains of Mongolia and Tuva it runs almost due north for thousands of kilometers, gathering the cold runoff of central Asia and delivering it, finally, into the ice-bound Kara Sea. It is one of the great northern rivers, frozen for much of the year and thunderous in the spring thaw.
Measured from the confluence of its two source streams at Kyzyl, the Yenisei runs about 3,487 kilometers — reckoned from the head of its Selenga tributary through Lake Baikal it stretches past 5,000, ranking it among the longest river systems on Earth. Its right bank rises into the Central Siberian Plateau while the left fades into the West Siberian Plain. Each spring, ice in the warmer south melts before the frozen north, damming meltwater and producing some of the largest floods anywhere. At its end the river widens into the long Yenisei Gulf reaching into the Kara Sea.
The river has been a Russian highway into Siberia since the Cossacks pushed east in the seventeenth century, and cities like Krasnoyarsk grew along it. In the Soviet era it was dammed for enormous hydroelectric stations whose reservoirs and power fed aluminum smelters and Cold War industry. The 2009 disaster at the Sayano-Shushenskaya plant, the country's largest, killed dozens and underscored how completely the Yenisei has been engineered. Its frigid waters still drain a wilderness larger than most countries.