Laptev Sea

The shores of the sea now called the Laptev Sea became a major field of Russian coastal surveying during the Great Northern Expedition of 1733–1743. Separate detachments worked west and east from the Lena River, aiming to join sections of Siberia's Arctic coastline into a continuous map. Their voyages followed earlier Russian journeys along much of that coast in the seventeenth century.

From 1736 Dmitry Laptev commanded one northern detachment; in 1739–1742 his party surveyed eastwards from the Lena towards the Kolyma region. His cousin Khariton led work along the Taymyr coast in the same years. The sea's later name commemorates both men, whose surveys helped turn an intermittently travelled coastline into a more systematically charted one.