ARKHANGELSK, August 20. /TASS/. An expedition of 80 scientists on board the Mstislav Keldysh research vessel on Friday departed from Arkhangelsk’s port to survey the Arctic seas.

"We shall begin working in the Barents Sea, and then will enter the Kara Sea, will make surveys at various locations, which we have been monitoring for many years, and then will go to the Vilkitsky Strait to enter the Laptev Sea’s eastern part," the expedition’s head, Deputy Director of the Shirshov Oceanology Studies Institute Mikhail Flint told TASS. "The expedition will continue for 36 days, and we shall return to Arkhangelsk on September 20."

New species

About 40% of the expedition’s participants are young scientists, he continued. Andrei Vedenin will lead a group, which will study the bed’s fauna. Main works will be at the Laptev Sea’s continental downhill, which has favorable conditions for the fauna. The most part of the Arctic Ocean’s continental downhill is not available for studies because of the ice, Vedenin said. "The downhill in the Laptev Sea is at lower latitudes, and recently almost always [in summer] it is free from ice, thus a non-ice class vessel may get there," the expert said.

According to him, the expedition may find new species. "We have every chance to find new species: those may be mollusks, crustaceans, shrimps, starfish, worms, primarily polychaetes," he continued. "No doubt, we shall find new species, but this is not the most interesting part, a sensation could be finding something new about species’ complexes, which will give a more complete picture of how the ecosystem functions."

The scientists will watch how the climate changes affect the Arctic seas. "The border of the ice cap, which does not melt in the Kara Sea, has shifted 900-950km to the north from the place where it used to be in the late 1970s - this is almost a distance between Arkhangelsk and Moscow… The climate changes affect areas of many species, and new aggressive alien species appear in the Kara Sea, where they influence greatly the sea’s fragile ecosystem," Mikhail Flint told TASS. "For example, the big crab - the opilio crab, which is fished in the Bering Sea, now comes into the Kara Sea - and it is a predator."

The water and the ice

During the expedition, the scientists will watch the ice and water to see whether they contain traces of anthropogenic pollutions. "Russia’s Arctic rivers drain 62-64% of this country’s area into the Arctic, thus bringing the anthropogenic and other pollutants there," Flint said. "We want to see what happens with those pollutants and how people will face them when the Arctic development becomes more active."

Another direction for scientific research is Novaya Zemlya’s ice, which has absorbed radioactive elements from the nuclear explosions tested there. "Those were mostly explosions in the air… a huge part [of the substances from explosions] is buried in the ice," Mikhail Flint said. "The ice is moving, and towards the seas are coming the ice areas, which contain, we have proved it, very high levels of radioactivity."

The vessel’s Captain Yuri Gorbach told TASS the ice situation along the expedition’s route is favorable. "The Kara Sea is free from ice, the Vilkitsky Strait is also clean, unlike it was a year earlier, when we crossed the strait though broken ice," the captain said. "The fast ice is only in the Laptev Sea.".