Alexander Bengert, Director General of Hydrographic Enterprise, has highlighted that the main obstacle hampering the expansion of Arctic navigation is that over 2 million square kilometers of the region’s water surface and adjacent areas have not been adequately studied.
Denmark and Canada have signed an agreement settling the territorial dispute over the uninhabited Hans Island in the middle of the Kennedy Channel of Nares Strait in the Arctic.
Denmark and Canada have signed an agreement settling the territorial dispute over the uninhabited Hans Island in the middle of the Kennedy Channel of Nares Strait in the Arctic.
The Russian Navy has completed a ten-year research project in the Arctic Ocean and its outlying seas conducted to determine and specify the baselines of Arctic islands.
The Russian Government has approved a list of regions of the Far North and equivalent status territories. The list includes parts of the republics of Altai, Buryatia, Karelia, Komi and Tyva, Trans-Baikal, Krasnoyarsk, Khabarovsk, Perm and Primorye territories, Amur, Arkhangelsk, Irkutsk, Sakhalin, Tomsk, Tyumen regions and the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area. It also includes Yakutia, Magadan and Murmansk regions, Nenets, Chukotka and Yamalo-Nenets autonomous areas as well as the Kamchatka Territory in full.
“The list of regions of the Far North was compiled in 1992–1994, and amended later on numerous occasions. Its new version has a clearer structure and conforms to the current territorial and municipal division of the country,” a statement posted on the government’s official Telegram channel says.
The document states that the residents of all localities covered by the previous versions of the list will keep the benefits, government guarantees and compensations for which they are eligible.
Researchers of the Moscow State University have created a database "Thermoabrasion of the seashores of the Russian Arctic", which contains information on qualitative and quantitative parameters characterizing the shores of six seas: Barents, Pechora, Kara, Laptev, East Siberian and Bering.
Thermoabrasion is the destruction of frozen shores as a result of thermal (thermal) and wave action. Almost a third of the entire coastline of the Arctic seas of Russia is subject to this process. To date, researchers from various scientific groups have published a lot of data on the destruction of the shores of the Arctic seas in various regions of the Russian Arctic. However, only the geographers of Moscow State University for the first time collected all the available knowledge into a single database "Thermoabrasion of the seashores of the Russian Arctic".
"Forming a database, the geographers of Moscow State University combined literary, archival and information obtained as a result of their own observations, which reflects the magnitude of the retreat or, conversely, accumulation (that is, "build-up") of the coast for various parts of the Russian Arctic over the past century," the report says.
The database allows you to analyze the spatial and temporal variability of the rates of coastal retreat along the Arctic coast of Russia, compare the rates of coastal destruction with various environmental features - lithological composition of rocks, geomorphological level, as well as hydrometeorological parameters - the duration of the ice-free period, annual sums of positive and negative air temperatures, the frequency of storms.
In the future, MSU geographers plan to supplement and expand the database in order to understand in more detail how the coastline of the Arctic seas changes over time.
