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The Diomede Islands
Two islands in the Bering Strait, Russian and American, 3.8 km apart and nearly a day apart in time
On a clear day, the people of Little Diomede can look across less than four kilometers of icy water and see tomorrow. The two rocky islands in the middle of the Bering Strait belong to different countries, Big Diomede to Russia and Little Diomede to the United States, and between them run both the international border and the International Date Line. Because each island keeps its own country's time, Big Diomede runs about 21 hours ahead of its neighbor, which is why they are nicknamed Tomorrow Island and Yesterday Isle. In winter, when the strait freezes, the gap between two superpowers can in principle be crossed on foot, though crossing is not permitted.
The islands sit roughly halfway between Alaska's Seward Peninsula and Russia's Chukotka Peninsula, at the narrowest point of the strait that links the Bering Sea to the Arctic Ocean. Together they cover about 35 square kilometers, and both are steep-sided, flat-topped blocks of granite with almost no level ground. Big Diomede, the larger, belongs to Russia's Chukotka region and has no civilian population. Little Diomede is home to the Iñupiat village of Diomede, a cluster of houses clinging to the western slope, with about 80 residents in recent counts. Supplies come by barge in summer and by helicopter year-round, and planes land on the sea ice when it is thick enough.
Iñupiat families lived on both islands for millennia and traveled freely between them and both mainlands. When the United States bought Alaska in 1867, the treaty drew the new boundary between the two islands. The line meant little until the Cold War, when the Soviet Union moved the people of Big Diomede to the mainland, set up military posts, and closed the strait in what became known as the Ice Curtain. Relatives on the two islands were cut off for decades. In 1987 the American swimmer Lynne Cox swam across, a feat praised by both Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Visa-free visits for Indigenous residents on both sides followed in 1989, but the Russian island remains a restricted border zone.