Earth from space: Trio of ringed ice caps look otherworldly on Russian Arctic islands

This stunning satellite image shows a trio of barren islands in the Russian Arctic, offering a rare glimpse at the colorful, concentric rings of the region's ever-present ice caps.

The Severnaya Zemlya archipelago is a collection of Russian-owned islands in the Arctic Ocean that cover around 14,300 square miles (37,000 square kilometers) — around the same size as Maryland — beyond Siberia's northernmost coastline. The archipelago sits along the boundary between the Kara Sea and the Laptev Sea and has four main landmasses: Komsomolets Island, Pioneer Island, October Revolution Island and Bolshevik Island. 

The region was only discovered in 1913 and was not properly visited until a couple decades later, making it one of the last of Earth's major archipelagos to be properly mapped, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.

This photo shows the intersection between Komsomolets Island (center), Pioneer Island (left) and October Revolution Island (right), which are separated by just a few miles of ocean, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. 

For most of the year, these islands are largely covered by ice and snow and are connected to one another by thick sea ice. But for around two months every summer, temperatures creep above freezing, enabling some of the frozen water to melt away, which exposes the barren landscape beneath. The only things that live there are lichens and a few bushes.

The thickest and oldest ice remains during the summer months, in the form of glaciers and hill-shaped ice caps that cover around half of the archipelago's surface.

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