#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The third Great Norilsk expedition has started. Two years ago, large-scale scientific research on the territory was started by scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences at the Nornickel’s initiative after an accidental fuel spill.
35 people from 14 scientific organizations from different cities (Novosibirsk, Tyumen, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, Yakutsk) were involved in the work on the first day.
Scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences Siberian Branch have been conducting observations in Taimyr to assess reclamation measures, the oil residues’ amount and to understand the effectiveness of the measures taken here in order to correct them if necessary for the third summer in a row.
“Over the previous years, there has been a trend in the loss of oil products in the Bezymyanny stream and the Daldykan river’s soil: sandy and stony soils have been washed well. Over the years, the expedition has decided where to work: the Bezymyanny stream’s floodplain, the Daldykan and Ambarnaya rivers’ banks and the Pyasino lake’s southern shores. It is also valuable to receive purely scientific information: researches have not been carried out here for many years, and now we will get the groundwork for many years to come”, said the doctor of biology Denis Sokolov.
Scientists will collect temperature sensors installed last season in Taimyr and Yamal, together with specialists from the Research Institute of Agriculture and Ecology of the Arctic. This will help to assess the climatic processes’ impact on the soils’ thermal conductivity. The Great Norilsk expedition will cover all the Nornickel’s production locations.
“This is the third work’s stage. The first one was a prospecting and evaluation: we recorded the natural environment’s state immediately after the spill. At the second stage, we assessed the ecosystem cleansing dynamics including the natural one. We have new tasks in the second stage, and now we continue monitoring, evaluating the effectiveness of the reclamation carried out by Nornickel, which is the most effective right now”, said the Great Norilsk expedition’s field work’s head, the SB RAS Institute of Petroleum Geology and geophysicist physical and chemical measurement methods laboratory’s head Rustam Timshanov.
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Text: Denis Kozhevnikov, Photo: Nikolay Schipko
