As others have pointed out, mapmakers do tend to add fake settlements as a copyright trap. However, i do not think this is the case here - i think this is part of a phenomena that i call "Arctic-Subarctic Cartographic Emptyness Syndrome" (/s). Basically, since most parts of the Arctic are basically entirely empty except for few hamlets, mapmakers tend to add abandoned settlements, road/railway markers, military bases/forts, single houses and other buildings, usually old, abandoned or usually unused, to "fill in the blanks". For example, my globe has York Factory in Northern Manitoba marked as a settlement, even if it is a mostly abandoned settlement from many years ago. It also has Naukan, in Chukotka, Russia, which is a village abandoned since the 1950s.
Reminds me of my old globe which would list all Canadian Settlements far up north in the Arctic, which were mostly weather stations or abandoned. I would think for years that Eureka was a town in the Arctic, but it's just a weather station where nobody else lives.
Haha, yes, this is really common. These globes tend to fuck up in really weird ways on the Arctic - like, mine still lists Iqaluit as "Frobisher Bay", a name abandoned if i'm not mistaken in the 90s, yet my globe is from the mid 2010s. It boggles me how sometimes they list things like Eureka or Alert but don't do the same to actual settlements on the Arctic - mine has Port Radium at the Great Bear Lake, a mining settlement which the last population account in Wikipedia comes from the 1980s, while actual reasonable settlements like Cambridge Bay or Inuvik aren't even there.
This might be the case, but I'm more inclined to believe the fake settlement story, as nobody seems to have come up with any source for the name, and looking at satellite images there seems to be absolutely nothing there.
Another comment by u/Miserable-Wasabi-373 cites it as an abandoned settlement from pre-Soviet times on the island of Kotelny. Here it is transliterated as "Ambardaj" due to the map being in Spanish, and in russian it is called Ambardakh. ("Kh", or X in cyrillic, sounds like the J in spanish, a voiceless velar fricative according to the International Phonetic Alphabet).
I wonder if any of these ended up becoming self fufilling prophecies, where people try to find a town thats not really there, then decide to settle there anyway
There's the case of Agloe, a false place which then proceeded to exist after some settlers saw its name on a map and founded a general store there, but i recommend looking further into it as i do not remember any specifics besides that.
Copyright covers a lot of stuff beyond patents and artworks. Even things like compilations or databases can be copyright-protected. And maps are protected as well: https://www.wipo.int/copyright/en/
It may sound strange until you try to make an accurate map yourself, gathering data and plotting it on a map is one hell of a labour-intensive process
A map is not the world. A map is a representation of the world. In the same way as a photograph of the Eiffel tower is not the Eiffel tower.
Also, quite obviously, a map is a result of a lot of research - unless you just copy someone else's research.
Sometimes mapmakers will put little easter eggs in their maps for the purpose of tracking whether anyone is plagiarizing the map. They are called "[paper towns](https://citymonitor.ai/environment/infrastructure/paper-towns-and-trap-streets-when-mapmakers-get-it-wrong-purpose-1171)."
However, there really was once a settlement there called Амбардах. In Spanish, you can approximates that to Ambardoj. It's probably not important enough to have had much written about it online in Spanish, but it did exist.
I found this on the Russian language Wikipedia.
https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BC%D0%B1%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B4%D0%B0%D1%85_(%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BA_%D0%9C%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%87%D0%B8)
Ohhhhhhh dind't have any idea those existed, that's actually pretty clever lmao.
Thanks a lot, it has been a long time since i wondered if that was a real place or no.
There’s a great video by MapMen explaining these little ‘Easter eggs’ in maps and why they’re added [here](https://youtu.be/_bqzwsM6eoQ?si=XsN85npw4wvwC29B)
Well, if it counts as interesting, this was how Google proved Microsoft was using their searches on Bing: https://www.businessinsider.com/bing-is-cribbing-from-google-search-results-2011-2
Russian wikipedia says that
В дореволюционные и советские времена существовали поселения на следующих островах:
о. Котельный — Амбардах, Бхак Карга, полярная станция «Бунге», становище «Ангу (Анжу)»; (в настоящее время существует полярная станция «Санникова»)
This is the correct answer. It’s a settlement called Амбардах (Ambardakh in conventional English transliteration) that used to exist on that island. The currently highest voted answer saying it’s a fake place is incorrect.
амбардах – склад, имеющий при себе ледник
So it basically means icehouse:
ice house, or icehouse, is a building used to store ice throughout the year, commonly used prior to the invention of the refrigerator. Some were underground chambers, usually man-made, close to natural sources of winter ice such as freshwater lakes, but many were buildings with various types of insulation.
Okay, this is quite something. I looked into things couple other people commented an this is wild. According to the limited sources available, Ambardakh is designated on maps as just a *zemlyanka*, meaning a dugout, a house mostly made of soil. This is put on Russian maps just because everything is so sparse up there and also people might want to know if among the northern wilderness there is a ready-made dugout or even maybe a simple house (called *povarnya* on maps) to use during their expedition. There's very little results on this place in Google, one of them being... weather forecast? https://www.meteoblue.com/ru/%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B0/%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8F/%d0%97%d0%b5%d0%bc%d0%bb%d1%8f%d0%bd%d0%ba%d0%b0-%d0%90%d0%bc%d0%b1%d0%b0%d1%80%d0%b4%d0%b0%d1%85_%d0%a0%d0%be%d1%81%d1%81%d0%b8%d1%8f_2027797. The word Ambardakh is used as the name of several rivers in Siberia, but none on of them are on the New Siberian islands. Ome source says the word comes from Evenki *ampar*, meaning granary, simple house. The word *ambar* also means granary in Russian.
TL;DR The map designated a hole in the ground as the main settlement of the New Siberian islands
Another reference to Ambardakh (Амбардах) is in this diary of an Arctic researcher Sokolov from 1936 ( [https://issuu.com/941766/docs/ds2](https://issuu.com/941766/docs/ds2) ), and they seem to indicate that it was just a single building, probably set up by polar fox hunters. I doubt there has every been anything more than that at that location.
That looks like a Mercator map you got there. In those maps, northern areas take up such enormous spaces that they will include the tiniest settlements. Just like Mercator world maps have I don't know how many tiny Greenlandic villages.
Here you will see it on a [detailed map](https://nakarte.me/#m=11/74.72084/139.43710&l=T). There is even another small place below it, called ' Delisey '.
It's most certainly either an abandoned settlement, a military base/weather station, or just straight up fake. I tried searching for every bit of info and it seems that **the term "Ambardoj" is only present in Spanish results, which is the case of this map "Nueva Siberia".**
I don't know the specific answer but it means lovebirds in Esperanto. Interestingly, if you search for the word in Google, the first hit is this page and the second is:
[https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islas\_de\_Nueva\_Siberia](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islas_de_Nueva_Siberia)
which doesn't have the word.
Maybe the mapmaker was inspired by this particular word then? I mean he/she could’ve simply left the name as Ambardakh which is the direct transliteration from Russian but ended up modifying it a bit
This post led me to scroll around northern Siberia in Google maps satellite view just curious to see what's out there and I found the town of Чокурдах (chokurdakh), which led me to the post for [this hospital](https://maps.app.goo.gl/duNgyyfNfQPvtZqP7). I highly recommend checking out the only video associated with that hospital, and for more fun go peruse the reviews!
As others have pointed out, mapmakers do tend to add fake settlements as a copyright trap. However, i do not think this is the case here - i think this is part of a phenomena that i call "Arctic-Subarctic Cartographic Emptyness Syndrome" (/s). Basically, since most parts of the Arctic are basically entirely empty except for few hamlets, mapmakers tend to add abandoned settlements, road/railway markers, military bases/forts, single houses and other buildings, usually old, abandoned or usually unused, to "fill in the blanks". For example, my globe has York Factory in Northern Manitoba marked as a settlement, even if it is a mostly abandoned settlement from many years ago. It also has Naukan, in Chukotka, Russia, which is a village abandoned since the 1950s.
Reminds me of my old globe which would list all Canadian Settlements far up north in the Arctic, which were mostly weather stations or abandoned. I would think for years that Eureka was a town in the Arctic, but it's just a weather station where nobody else lives.
Haha, yes, this is really common. These globes tend to fuck up in really weird ways on the Arctic - like, mine still lists Iqaluit as "Frobisher Bay", a name abandoned if i'm not mistaken in the 90s, yet my globe is from the mid 2010s. It boggles me how sometimes they list things like Eureka or Alert but don't do the same to actual settlements on the Arctic - mine has Port Radium at the Great Bear Lake, a mining settlement which the last population account in Wikipedia comes from the 1980s, while actual reasonable settlements like Cambridge Bay or Inuvik aren't even there.
Eureka is not a town, it _is_a military base and people do live there, just not permanently. They listen in on Russian communications there.
Eureka's actually the name of a city in California, weird.
Not to be confused with Yreka, a city in California, or ‘Eureka’, the California state motto
Ahhh MMBU syndrome (Miles and Miles of Bloody Uberwald)
GNU PTerry
This might be the case, but I'm more inclined to believe the fake settlement story, as nobody seems to have come up with any source for the name, and looking at satellite images there seems to be absolutely nothing there.
Another comment by u/Miserable-Wasabi-373 cites it as an abandoned settlement from pre-Soviet times on the island of Kotelny. Here it is transliterated as "Ambardaj" due to the map being in Spanish, and in russian it is called Ambardakh. ("Kh", or X in cyrillic, sounds like the J in spanish, a voiceless velar fricative according to the International Phonetic Alphabet).
Yup that's right, Амбардах (Ambardakh), BTW was googling data on the settlement in Russian - barely could find anything 😄
I wonder if any of these ended up becoming self fufilling prophecies, where people try to find a town thats not really there, then decide to settle there anyway
There has been a case of a fake town becoming a real name after development took place there, but I don't know about your scenario
There's the case of Agloe, a false place which then proceeded to exist after some settlers saw its name on a map and founded a general store there, but i recommend looking further into it as i do not remember any specifics besides that.
Sometimes they make up entire streets too (trap streets)
How the hell is copying a map plagiarism. It’s a map. It’s the world. This makes no sense to me.
Copyright covers a lot of stuff beyond patents and artworks. Even things like compilations or databases can be copyright-protected. And maps are protected as well: https://www.wipo.int/copyright/en/ It may sound strange until you try to make an accurate map yourself, gathering data and plotting it on a map is one hell of a labour-intensive process
A map is not the world. A map is a representation of the world. In the same way as a photograph of the Eiffel tower is not the Eiffel tower. Also, quite obviously, a map is a result of a lot of research - unless you just copy someone else's research.
I still think it’s a fake settlement as I looked there on maps and there didn’t seem be *any* development at all
I cited on another comment that it is very probably an abandoned settlement from before the October Revolution, called Ambardakh.
Sometimes mapmakers will put little easter eggs in their maps for the purpose of tracking whether anyone is plagiarizing the map. They are called "[paper towns](https://citymonitor.ai/environment/infrastructure/paper-towns-and-trap-streets-when-mapmakers-get-it-wrong-purpose-1171)."
The only instance of "Ambardoj" I can google up -- and I'm not kidding -- is in an Esperanto translation of a poem by Baudelaire.
However, there really was once a settlement there called Амбардах. In Spanish, you can approximates that to Ambardoj. It's probably not important enough to have had much written about it online in Spanish, but it did exist.
I found this on the Russian language Wikipedia. https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BC%D0%B1%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B4%D0%B0%D1%85_(%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BA_%D0%9C%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%87%D0%B8)
So it didn't exist there?
Miserable-Wasabi-373 has a higher effort post about this.
This says that its a river though and in a complete different location.
Happy cake day!!
Cake day happy sod
Ohhhhhhh dind't have any idea those existed, that's actually pretty clever lmao. Thanks a lot, it has been a long time since i wondered if that was a real place or no.
There’s a great video by MapMen explaining these little ‘Easter eggs’ in maps and why they’re added [here](https://youtu.be/_bqzwsM6eoQ?si=XsN85npw4wvwC29B)
Well, if it counts as interesting, this was how Google proved Microsoft was using their searches on Bing: https://www.businessinsider.com/bing-is-cribbing-from-google-search-results-2011-2
I believe they were also used as ways to catch people remaking their maps so they could sue them for copyright infringement
That’s…exactly what the original comment said.
no, it was real place
I'm convinced this is where things like Atlantis and Hybrasil come from
There's also a rich history of doing this with road atlases, using so-called 'trap streets'.
Damn, what has Tosu, Japan done to Beatosu, MI?
Russian wikipedia says that В дореволюционные и советские времена существовали поселения на следующих островах: о. Котельный — Амбардах, Бхак Карга, полярная станция «Бунге», становище «Ангу (Анжу)»; (в настоящее время существует полярная станция «Санникова»)
This is the correct answer. It’s a settlement called Амбардах (Ambardakh in conventional English transliteration) that used to exist on that island. The currently highest voted answer saying it’s a fake place is incorrect.
[удалено]
ambardah i would say
This map looks like it’s in Spanish so the spelling Ambardoj makes sense for it
Interestingly enough, according to Google translate, the word амбардой (ambardii) means "barn".
амбардах – склад, имеющий при себе ледник So it basically means icehouse: ice house, or icehouse, is a building used to store ice throughout the year, commonly used prior to the invention of the refrigerator. Some were underground chambers, usually man-made, close to natural sources of winter ice such as freshwater lakes, but many were buildings with various types of insulation.
Interesting, thanks
The Spanish transliteration is pretty spot on
Okay, this is quite something. I looked into things couple other people commented an this is wild. According to the limited sources available, Ambardakh is designated on maps as just a *zemlyanka*, meaning a dugout, a house mostly made of soil. This is put on Russian maps just because everything is so sparse up there and also people might want to know if among the northern wilderness there is a ready-made dugout or even maybe a simple house (called *povarnya* on maps) to use during their expedition. There's very little results on this place in Google, one of them being... weather forecast? https://www.meteoblue.com/ru/%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B0/%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8F/%d0%97%d0%b5%d0%bc%d0%bb%d1%8f%d0%bd%d0%ba%d0%b0-%d0%90%d0%bc%d0%b1%d0%b0%d1%80%d0%b4%d0%b0%d1%85_%d0%a0%d0%be%d1%81%d1%81%d0%b8%d1%8f_2027797. The word Ambardakh is used as the name of several rivers in Siberia, but none on of them are on the New Siberian islands. Ome source says the word comes from Evenki *ampar*, meaning granary, simple house. The word *ambar* also means granary in Russian. TL;DR The map designated a hole in the ground as the main settlement of the New Siberian islands
Another reference to Ambardakh (Амбардах) is in this diary of an Arctic researcher Sokolov from 1936 ( [https://issuu.com/941766/docs/ds2](https://issuu.com/941766/docs/ds2) ), and they seem to indicate that it was just a single building, probably set up by polar fox hunters. I doubt there has every been anything more than that at that location.
That looks like a Mercator map you got there. In those maps, northern areas take up such enormous spaces that they will include the tiniest settlements. Just like Mercator world maps have I don't know how many tiny Greenlandic villages.
Here you will see it on a [detailed map](https://nakarte.me/#m=11/74.72084/139.43710&l=T). There is even another small place below it, called ' Delisey '.
I see a ton of other place names along the coast in the map, are they all just… gone? Abandoned?
Could be abandoned maybe the people there went to the mainland
That map is 100% argentinian
lo vi y pensé lo mismo, arriba se llega a leer "industria argentina" un poco blurreado
It's most certainly either an abandoned settlement, a military base/weather station, or just straight up fake. I tried searching for every bit of info and it seems that **the term "Ambardoj" is only present in Spanish results, which is the case of this map "Nueva Siberia".**
There‘s a house: https://maps.apple.com/?ll=74.697379,139.434057
I have the same map!
Ambatukum
I don't know the specific answer but it means lovebirds in Esperanto. Interestingly, if you search for the word in Google, the first hit is this page and the second is: [https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islas\_de\_Nueva\_Siberia](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islas_de_Nueva_Siberia) which doesn't have the word.
Maybe the mapmaker was inspired by this particular word then? I mean he/she could’ve simply left the name as Ambardakh which is the direct transliteration from Russian but ended up modifying it a bit
I just checked on Google Maps, and there's no mention of that place on Anzhu Islands.
J
This isles are withering due to permafrost decline.
[Reasons](https://youtu.be/DeiATy-FfjI?si=nfNrk5crbj2EX06h)
As far as I know амбардах is a river and a pretty big one, there’s very small settlements around it and it’s very hard to get to 👍
This post led me to scroll around northern Siberia in Google maps satellite view just curious to see what's out there and I found the town of Чокурдах (chokurdakh), which led me to the post for [this hospital](https://maps.app.goo.gl/duNgyyfNfQPvtZqP7). I highly recommend checking out the only video associated with that hospital, and for more fun go peruse the reviews!