Chermsideøya: Nordkapp

Nordkapp on Chermsideøya.

Many have been to Nordkapp, Norway’s north cape. But only few know that there is another Nordkapp in the same sector of the Arctic, 1050 kilometres further north: this “real” Nordkapp is located on Chermsideøya, a small island on the north side of Nordaustland.

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Panorama 1 – The eastern one of the two cairns on Chermsideøya’s Nordkapp on a rather grey day.

The “real” Nordkapp?

The designation “real” Nordkapp may be slightly provocative. After all, “Nordkapp” is not a protected term, you can call any place Nordkapp, including the northern corner of your vegetable garden. And Chermsideøya’s Nordkapp isn’t Svalbard’s northermost bit of land – that is Rossøya – and far from the northernmost land in the world, that is northernmost Greenland.

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Panorama 2 – The same cairn on a clear day, with views of Waldenøya (the small, isolated island) and Sjuøyane.

But that does not matter too much – in the end, it is just terminology. Just a name. Let’s rather take the opportunity to have a good look at the place when there is a rare opportunity to get close to it. The cliffs of Nordkapp are just 130 metres high, but the terrain is quite rocky, and walking over the boulder fields is something that many will experience as challenging. But the views of the surroundings, including Sjuøyane and Waldenøya, are worth any effort.

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Panorama 3 – The western one of the two cairns at Nordkapp on Chermsideøya.

An open air museum of geology

And once you are there, you can enjoy the natural open air museum of the regional geology for free. Next to countless erratic boulders which represent a wide spectrum of the various bedrock types of the region, the local bedrock consists mostly of various granites, gneisses and intrusive rocks which altogether give the visitor a colourful picture of the wild early history of the area.

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Panorama 4 – The rocky hills near Tottodden, with a view of the “red bay”. The granite there is of an intense reddish colour.

“Red Bay” (not an official name) at Tottodden on Chermsideøya: red granite.

Geologists can find traces of the Grenville-event (collision of several continents forming an early supercontinent called Rodinia about 1 billion years ago) and the Caledonian orogeny (continent collision leading to the formation of a northern continent known as Laurasia about 400 million years ago) by using sophisticated methods such as radiometric dating. And if you find this too technical, then you can simply enjoy the colourful rocks and the beautiful structures 🙂

Intrusive veins near Tottodden.

Knoll and Tott: the Katzenjammer Kids

There is one curiousity: the mountain ridge south of Nordkapp is named Tott, and the one on the west side of the island has got the name Knoll on the map. Knoll and Tott are the Norwegian names of Fritz and Hans, the two main figures of a comic strip known as The Katzenjammer Kids which appeared in American newspapers for many years starting in 1897. I don’t know what Fritz and Hans – or, rather, their Norwegian alter egos – are doing on Chermsideøya. I guess that the cartographers who put their names on the map in 1964 were running out of ideas and there must have been a fan amongst them. There is an article about the Katzenjammer Kids in Wikipedia.