MURMANSK, January 30. /TASS/. The first continental expedition along the Russian Federation's coastal borders, Rossiya 360, will cross nine Arctic regions and will map locations of the waste, accumulated there over recent 80 years of the Arctic development, the Clean Arctic Ecology Project's leader Andrey Nagibin told TASS.

"Part of the Rossiya 360 Expedition will be in the country's nine Arctic regions. The accumulated environmental damage sometimes may be seen even from the air, thus, the expedition team will register and report to us everything that would be seen from under snowdrifts," he said. "We will put the data onto the map of future Clean Arctic missions, which this year will begin in June."

The polluted Arctic territories that will be mapped during the Rossiya 360 Expedition may be cleaned as early as in 2024, though everything will depend on how far the location would be and what kind of waste the expedition would identify there, he added.

"Sure, everything will depend on the logistics - how to get to the location, plus we must observe the safety requirements, because in some cases volunteers must not be allowed to the cleanup area, where only special equipment may work. The cleaning is a serious issue for longer than one year. The 80 years of the Arctic exploration have left the ecological footprint on five million hectares, and I cannot say how long it may take us to clean up everything, he concluded.

Tourism in Russian regions

A Russian Arctic traveler and blogger, Bogdan Bulychev, the expedition's organizer, noted to TASS that in addition to the educational, ecological and ethnographical goals, the Rossiya 360 Expedition's aim is to develop tourism in previously unexplored territories near the national borders.

"We will travel to areas where 99.9% of the world's population has never been and will never be. If we manage to <...> attract there at least 0.1% of the population, <...> then everything was not in vain. People can see our travels, they are curious to go there and they do go. We are creating the visual content, after watching it people want to visit those scenic places that they can see on the screen, but where they have never been before," he told TASS.

Rossiya 360 Expedition

The Rossiya 360 first continental expedition has kicked off from Murmansk. The plan is - in December 2024, the team will return to Murmansk, having traveled on wheeled vehicles along all the land borders of Russia, thus having covered more than 33,000 km across Russia's 58 regions. The expedition plans to set two records, and to collect material for several films. Pictures and stories by the expedition participants will be published in a book for children. Russian President Vladimir Putin has supported the Rossiya 360 Expedition.