The Yenisey, also romanised as Yenisei, Enisei, or Jenisej, is the fifth-longest river system in the world, and the largest to drain into the Arctic Ocean. Rising in Mungaragiyn-gol in Mongolia, it follows a northerly course before draining into the Yenisey Gulf in the Kara Sea. The Yenisey divides the Western Siberian Plain in the west from the Central Siberian Plateau to the east; it drains a large part of central Siberia. It is the central one of three large Siberian rivers that flow into the Arctic Ocean. The maximum depth of the Yenisey is and the average depth is. The depth of river outflow is and inflow is.
The, partly navigable Upper Angara River feeds into the northern end of Lake Baikal from the Buryat Republic but the largest inflow is from the Selenga which forms a delta on the southeastern side. near Krasnoyarsk
The Taimyr reindeer herd, a migrating tundra reindeer, the largest reindeer herd in the world, migrated to winter grazing ranges along the Yenisey.
Navigation
River steamers first came to the Yenesei River in 1864 and were brought in from Holland and England across the icy Kara Sea. One was the SS Nikolai. The SS Thames attempted to explore the river, overwintered in 1876, but was damaged in the ice and eventually wrecked in the river. Success came with the steamers Frazer, Express in 1878, and the next year, Moscow hauling supplies in and wheat out. The Dalman reached Yeneisisk in 1881. Imperial Russia placed river steamers on the massive river in an attempt to free up communication with land-locked Siberia. One boat was the SS St. Nicholas which took the future Tsar Nicholas II on his voyage to Siberia, and later conveyed Vladimir Lenin to prison. Engineers attempted to place river steamers on regular service on the river during the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The boats were needed to bring in the rails, engines and supplies. Captain Joseph Wiggins sailed the Orestes with rail and parted out river steamers in 1893. However, the sea and river route proved very difficult with several ships lost at sea and on the river. Both the Ob and Yenisey mouths feed into very long inlets, several hundred kilometres in length, which are shallow, ice bound and prone to high winds and thus treacherous for navigation. After the completion of the railway, river traffic reduced only to local service as the Arctic route and long river proved much too indirect a route. The first recreation team to navigate the Yenisey's entire length, including its violent upper tributary in Mongolia, was an Australian-Canadian effort completed in September 2001. Ben Kozel, Tim Cope, Colin Angus and Remy Quinter were on this team. Both Kozel and Angus wrote books detailing this expedition, and a documentary was produced for National Geographic Television. A canal inclined plane was built on the river in 1985 at the Krasnoyarsk Dam.
History
Nomadic tribes such as the Ket people and the Yugh people have lived along the banks of the Yenisey since ancient times, and this region is the location of the Yeniseian language family. The Ket, numbering about 1000, are the only survivors today of those who originally lived throughout central southern Siberia near the river banks. Their extinct relatives included the Kotts, Assans, Arins, Baikots and Pumpokols who lived further upriver to the south. The modern Ket lived in the eastern middle areas of the river before being assimilated politically into Russia during the 17th through 19th centuries. Some of the earliest known evidence of Turkic origins was found in the Yenisey Valley in the form of stelae, stone monoliths and memorial tablets dating from between the 7th and 9th centuries AD, along with some documents that were found in China's Xinjiang region. The written evidence gathered from these sources tells of battles fought between the Turks and the Chinese and other legends. There are also examples of Uyghur poetry, though most have survived only in Chinese translation. Wheat from the Yenisey was sold by Muslims and Uighurs during inadequate harvests to Bukhara and Soghd during the Tahirid era. Russians first reached the upper Yenisey in 1605, travelling from the Ob, up the Ket, portaging and then down the Yenisey as far as the Sym. During World War II, Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire agreed to divide Asia along a line that followed the Yenisey to the border of China and then along the border of China and the Soviet Union.
Pollution
Studies have shown that the Yenisey suffers from contamination caused by radioactive discharges from a factory that produced bomb-grade plutonium in the secret city of Krasnoyarsk-26, now known as Zheleznogorsk.
