Russian scientists minimise climate risks in the Arctic

Researchers will study the depths of the Kara Sea and trace levels of radiation accumulated in Arctic glaciers.

Photo from: Wikimedia Commons

An expedition of Russian scientists has left Murmansk for the islands of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Kara Sea on the research vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh. The scientific mission will look for containers of nuclear waste lost for years in polar waters. Such waste poses the risk of contaminating the environment, which in turn will unbalance the already fragile Arctic climate and ecological system.

The head of the “Ecology of the Oceans” department at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology told reporters. Mikhail Flint, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told reporters that according to archival data, many tanks with spent nuclear materials sank in Blagopolozhcheniya Bay near Novaya Zemlya.

The seabed and sediment structures in the bay are such that the containers could have slid down the underwater slope and ended up at a significant distance from where they were buried, according to archival documents.

Scientists have calculated the approximate location of the waste and now intend to identify the exact location of the containers and assess their condition and the presence of leaked contamination.

Specialists from the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and staff from the Russian Emergencies Ministry will take part in the voyage.

The expedition also intends to study a glacier in the bay. It contains traces of radioactive substances that fell there with the snow during nuclear tests at the Novozemelsk test site in the 1950s and 1960s.

As Mikhail Flint told Izvestia reporters in 2018, scientists estimate that five reactor compartments, including those with spent nuclear fuel, 19 vessels with solid radioactive waste, 755 structures and units of nuclear power plants contaminated with radioactive substances, not protected by hermetic packaging, and about 17,000 containers with such waste are at the bottom in the western Arctic.

Experts believe that the durability of submerged sites will last until about 2200, so they will not pose a serious threat to Arctic ecology for the foreseeable future.

Although individual sites in Arctic waters have occasionally been surveyed, the main difficulty with surveying them has been the lack of accurate knowledge about most of them. This was because, during the Cold War era, all information about activities around Novaya Zemlya was strictly classified.

Cover photo: WhitcombeRD