LEDYANAYA HARBOR /Novaya Zemlya/, July 10. /TASS/. Scientists, participating in the Arctic Floating University expedition onboard the Professor Molchanov scientific/research vessel, studied conditions of the northernmost monument on the Novaya Zemlya Archipelago in the Russian Arctic National Park, a TASS correspondent reported from the vessel. The monument is the winter camp of Dutch navigator Willem Barents (1596-1597), located in Ledyanaya Harbor.

In August, 1596, Barents' ship got ice trapped near Novaya Zemlya's Cape Spory Navolok. The sailors built a house, Behouden Huys, to spend the winter, and in 1597 they sailed on boats heading for the Kola Peninsula. During that voyage, Barents passed away. His team made it to the peninsula.

By now, only the house's base logs have remained. "As you can see, the condition is not very good, almost everything has collapsed," Yevgeny Ermolov, head of the National Park's department for preservation of historical and cultural heritage, told TASS. "We can see that over the recent decade the lower logs have been collapsing, only three logs have remained and we can see ruins of the fourth layer, the splinters. We can see that logs are turning into dust and will probably disappear within the next decade."

The winter camp was discovered in 1871 by Norway's Captain E. Carlsen. Back then, it was a house, only the roof had fallen inside. In the house there were beds, chests with household items, and a hearth. The first research was carried out by a Soviet expedition. It found the house in a worse condition, as the walls had already begun to collapse. The archaeological excavations in the late 1970s and in 1995 accelerated the destruction. "As they have dug up everything, violated the top layer, the degradation only accelerated," the expert said. "And plus also the current climatic changes." Items from the winter camp are kept at various museums in different countries.

The National Park has been monitoring the monument, but the expert states that its destruction is inevitable, it is a natural process, he said. "The house is 400 years old already, the age is huge, and the logs are even older, because it was driftwood that was found on the Ledyanaya Harbor coast. Those logs could have drifted for decades, or maybe centuries, then remained lying on the shore, so they were far from being fresh," he added. "This is an irreversible process, a natural process."

The Arctic Floating University is a joint project of the Northern Arctic Federal University (NAFU) and the Northern Branch for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring. The expeditions continue since 2012. The project's partners and sponsors are the Ministry for Development of the Far East and Arctic, VTB, Novatek, Norilsk Nickel, the Arkhangelsk Region's government, and the Russian Geographical Society.