#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. A group of participants in the children’s and youth geological movement in Russia spent ten unforgettable days in Norilsk. Schoolchildren from Novosibirsk and Gubaha not only visited Norilsk Nickel enterprises, but also took away a collection of minerals for their museums.
Children and their leaders call the trip to Norilsk nothing but a miracle. Moreover, before that, the participants in the children’s and youth geological movement had already visited many places.
“Urals, Siberia, the European part of Russia, the Kola Peninsula, the Caucasus, neighboring countries: Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan”, lists the excursions geography the head of the Young Geologist club from Novosibirsk, Irina Negoda. “But here we were not sure what would happen: Norilsk Nickel is such a giant! It’s just that you can’t get into the company’s enterprises. We are very grateful to the Russian Geological Society and the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who sent a petition to the Nornickel authorities, who organized such a great program for children”.
The combined team that arrived in Norilsk included six boys and one girl aged 13 to 17. All of them are part of the children’s and youth geological movement, which today has over 100 organizational structures in more than 50 regions of Russia.
Norilsk did not disappoint young geologists. Take the Skalisty mine alone! There they are building the deepest shafts in Eurasia. And by 2025, this will be the Nornickel’s first autonomous mine: here, at the Glubokaya mine, they plan to extract ore in an unmanned way.
“Before that, we went to the observation deck of the Kayerkansky mine quarry, where coal is mined. The scale was amazing, although our children geologists have already seen similar careers in other cities. But Skalisty is something special”, Irina Negoda expresses the group’s opinion. “The most modern production, technology. Production, which in Russia today can be proud of. And what is important – the people who work there speak of their enterprise with great warmth. They say that the whole future is here, in Norilsk. It is evident that they like the work, the children noted this”.
Schoolchildren are not allowed to go underground, but they can undergo a medical examination using modern equipment, as miners do before a shift.
The next point of the visit was the control room of the cage lifting installations – through a special window, the guys could watch how the workers rise to the surface after the shift. And in the operations center for planning and control of mine operations, they learned that the mine workings are now equipped with video cameras and access to Wi-Fi.
Evgeniy Stelnikovich, the mine’s deputy chief geologist, showed the children a collection of ore samples presented in the small Skalisty Museum, explaining which of them are priority and what is sent for processing. Lunch and miner’s tea left a pleasant aftertaste at the Skalisty – the guys even filled bottles to take it with them on a trip to the Red Stones waterfall. The children’s program was very rich.
Also, the guests took the excursion along the bottom of the ancient ocean in the Yergalah area. There is nothing like it anywhere else in Siberia. At the site of these excavations, the local branch of the Russian Geographical Society is preparing to create a paleontological park.
In Dudinka, the children saw the mammoth Zhenya, in the Main choom they were initiated into the Taimyr people, and at the opening of the interactive exhibition in the Norilsk Museum, young geologists professionally identified corals and other exhibits. They returned from Norilsk full-handed.
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Text: Elena Popova, Photo: Norilsk Nickel press service
