From "The Polar Voyage in Frankenstein"

"We used the information from these voyages to get a sense of where Walton may have been traveling after his departure from Arkhangelsk. There were effectively two routes that he could have taken, considering the fact that his was a scientific expedition. The first would have been to travel northeast from Arkhangelsk with the intention of following the retreating ice sheets and round the northern tip of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. To ascertain whether this was a possibility, we used data sets collected between 1860 and 1920 (provided by the ACSYS Historical Ice Chart Archive) as proxy data sets for where sea ice may have been a century earlier. If Walton followed this route, the furthest that Walton's ship would have been likely to travel by August, when the final scene of the novel was set, was likely just north of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. If instead, Walton traveled through the Kara Strait it is possible that that he would have intercepted Victor Frankenstein in the ice flows of the Kara Sea, which remains frozen most of the year. The furthest east that he would have been able to travel with his crew would have been to Ob River in Western Siberia, which was the furthest that any voyages were able to travel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."

Jason M. Kelly