| SAKHALIN ISLAND |
Sakhalin Island is a 600-mile long, remote, snowy, densely wooded and sparsely populated island off the east coast of Russia.
The island has only a few towns that are mostly shabby apartment blocks built during the time of the Soviet Union.
Sakhalin Island has become important internationally because there are over 40 million barrels of oil and 4.5 billion barrels of gas lying under the seas around the island. The big oil multinational companies – Shell, ExxonMobil and BP – have moved in and established drilling platforms and pipelines on and around Sakhalin Island.
In The Goldilocks Game, former Russian oligarch, Boris Medvedev, has plans to use perforating guns in the drilling process around Sakhalin Island in an unusual way.
Find out here what plans Medvedev has and how it will affect Sakhalin Island the surrounding environment and the heroine, Tania Likamolova.
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| FACTS ABOUT SAKHALIN ISLAND |
Sakhalin Island is a 9-hour flight from Moscow and is 7 hours ahead of Moscow's time.
Royal Dutch Shell PLC has the controlling stake (55%) in the Sakhalin Energy Investment Company. With its Japanese partners, Mitsui & Co. and Mitsubishi Corp., Shell has set up its operations all across the island. They run an operation called Sakhalin II which is made up of six projects costing more than a billion US dollars each, and they employ over 17,000 people most of whom are expatriate workers.
After drilling, the oil and gas are pumped onshore by pipeline and moved 500 miles to the southern tip of the island. From there, the oil is loaded onto supertankers and the gas is supercooled to produced LNG – Liquefied Natural Gas – which is also transported by special tankers to Japan, South Korea, China and the USA.
Hellish Working Conditions
After a 9-hour flight from Moscow, expatriate oil workers board the train that runs from the capital Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk to the northern tip Nogliki. It is a 15 hour train ride so the company (Sakhalin Energy) provides sleeping carriages and protection on the journey by huge, menacing guards with tattoos to fight off bandits who attack the trains. After reaching the end of the line, there is another 43-mile trip by road to reach the operation plant. The plant is surrounded by forests which have bears roaming and the weather is so severe that 70 people work continuously for six months of the year just clearing snow and ice.
On the drilling platforms that are at sea, there are ice floes drifting about in the Sea of Okhotsk and so the platforms have been built to withstand collisions.
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| SIBERIA |
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Siberia is a vast region of Russia which stretches from the Ural Mountains in the East to the Pacific Ocean in the West, and from the Arctic Ocean in the North to Mongolia and China in the South.
The CIA world factbook describes Siberia's climate as "sub-arctic" and its winters as "frigid". It also lists Siberia's natural hazards as being the permafrost over most of Siberia, the floods in spring (when some of the ice melts) and the forest fires in summer. Some of these hazards and severe weather conditions probably explain why only just over a quarter of Russians live in Siberia even though Siberia makes up over three quarters of the whole area of the Russian Federation.
Siberia is significant in The Goldilocks Game because it is where Tania Likamolova comes from (see entry on Nikolayevsk-on-Amur) and Lake Baikal, which is also in Siberia, is a key scene in the story. You can find out more about these locations by following the links on this page, or by reading the story yourself, available from this link. |
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| LAKE BAIKAL |
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One of the world's most impressive lakes, Lake Baikal, is located in the harsh, rugged mountains of east central Siberia.
It measures nearly 500 miles in length and has an area of over 12,000 square miles. It is nearly 1,500 feet above sea level and at its maximum depth is more than a mile deep.
Lake Baikal has the greatest volume of freshwater of any lake in Europe and Asia and is the deepest lake in the world.
Two key scenes in The Goldilocks Game are located around Lake Baikal. Read more about them here. |
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| LOCATIONS |
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| MAP OF LAKE BAIKAL |
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| NIKOLAEVSK-ON-AMUR |
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Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, also spelled Nikolajevsk-na-Amure, is a town with a population of about 30,000 people in far eastern Russia and the place where Tania Likamolova was born. Tania's parents and relatives still live there.
Nikolayevsk-on-Amur is on the river Amur about 50 miles from the Amur estuary. It was founded in 1850 and named after Nicholas I of Russia. The town became important as a commercial port to the Pacific and a naval base was also built there. However, when the cities of Vladivostok and Sovetskaya Gavan (which both had good rail links to the rests of Russia) were developed, Nikolayevsk-on-Amur lost significance.
It still has ship repair yards and industries of local significance. The town is important in The Goldilocks Game because it is one of the factors Tania must consider when she is making her decision whether to help IRIS. You can read here why Tania thinks about her home town.
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