City in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia
About Norilsk
Norilsk is an industrial closed city in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, located south of the western Taymyr Peninsula, around 90 km east of the Yenisey River and 1,500 km north of Krasnoyarsk. Norilsk is 300 km north of the Arctic Circle and 2,400 km from the North Pole. It has a permanent population of 176,735 as of 2024, and up to 220,000 including temporary inhabitants. It is the second-largest city in the region after Krasnoyarsk. It is the world's northernmost city with more than 175,000 inhabitants, and the second-largest city inside the Arctic Circle. Norilsk and Yakutsk are the only large cities in the continuous permafrost zone.
Name
Norilsk owes its name to its geographical location. The Norilsk river flows near the city, which is located near the Norilsk mountains. The travelers Khariton Laptev, Alexander Fyodorovich Middendorf, and Fedor Bogdanovich Schmidt mentioned the river Norilsk and the Norilsk mountains in their accounts. According to the Soviet Arctic explorer Nikolay Urvantsev, the Norilsk river was probably given its former name, Norilka, in the 16th–17th centuries during the existence of the city Mangazeya, when the Taymyr was settled by Russian fishing people. It is likely that the name of the river comes from the word norilo, a long thin pole that was used to stretch a string of trap nets from hole to hole under the ice. Some argue the name derives from the Yukagir word nerile, meaning "an earthen hill, consisting of some crags, cliffs" (the mountains around Norilsk do indeed resemble neriles). …
History
People knew about the minerals in the Norilsk area as early as the Bronze Age. A site with primitive equipment for smelting and casting, as well as raw materials (balls of native copper), has been discovered near Lake Pyasino. In the 16th–17th centuries, copper from the Norilsk deposits was used by the inhabitants of Mangazeya, a city located beyond the Arctic Circle on the Taz River, which was an important regional trading and craft center. During the excavations of Mangazeya in 1972–1975, professor Mikhail Ivanovich Belov discovered a vast foundry yard. Platinoids were found in the remains of the copper wares unearthed there. Geologist and explorer Nikolay Urvantsev carried out further studies of the Norilsk region during expeditions between 1919 and 1926, which confirmed the presence of rich deposits of coal and polymetallic ores in the western spurs of the Putorana Plateau. …
Geography
Norilsk sits between the West Siberian Plain and Central Siberian Plateau at the foot of the 1,700-meter-high (5,600 ft) Putorana Mountains. Due to Norilsk's geographical isolation on the Taymyr Peninsula, the rest of Russia is usually referred to as "the mainland", and expressions like "move to the mainland" or "on the mainland" are common among locals. Norilsk is one of the world's most northerly settlements and is both the second largest city built on permafrost (after Yakutsk), and the second largest city inside the Arctic Circle (after Murmansk). The midnight sun is above the horizon from May 20 to July 24, and the time when the sun does not rise, polar night, lasts from approximately November 30 to January 13. …
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