ST. PETERSBURG, July 18. /TASS/. Arctic specialists created a virtual museum of a most important polar station in the history of Russian science - Tikhaya Bay on the Franz Josef Land archipelago. The site offers an interactive tour to learn history of that remote and hard-to-reach object, Pavel Filin, Deputy Director of the Museum and Exhibition Center for Technical and Technological Development of the Arctic, told a news conference at TASS.
"We've decided to work on a virtual museum of the Tikhaya Bay (Quiet Bay) polar station. The project was supported, and we started <...> work. <...> We have created a portal - quietbay.ru . Its main blocks are the polar station's history - the station is rich in history, a lot of events took place there, another block is on the station's restoration, plus a block related to our center, and so on. We are proud of Tikhaya Bay's interactive map, <...> to which we've attached an interactive tour block, made fantastic 3D panoramas - all into a virtual tour," he said.
The portal offers large blocks with multimedia materials, historical photo and video materials. The site, like the virtual museum, will be updated to become a key aggregator of information about that polar station (founded in 1929).
The project's another component is an offline application for tourists who have managed to get to the remote archipelago. They will learn about all objects at the polar station. Tourists may get to the station as part of Arctic cruises onboard the 50 Let Pobedy nuclear-powered icebreaker. Specialists have been creating a museum space and have been reconstructing the polar station's facilities. The key facility is the aircraft hangar, where a museum will be located. The work was interrupted after 2020, and is due to resume in 2025.
The Tikhaya Bay polar station's history
"The Tikhaya Bay polar station is a most interesting station. Whoever we could remember of our most famous Soviet, Russian polar explorers - they all have worked at that station. The first wintering there was back in 1913-1914 - the Sedov expedition. The station was founded in 1929 during the Otto Schmidt expedition, and outstanding polar explorer Ivan Papanin was one of the first directors. Krenkel, Fedorov have worked there, Vodopyanov's plane was based there - so to say, top representatives of our science. Noteworthy, the station has perfectly preserved, almost all the buildings of the 1920s and 1930s have been preserved. We don't seem to have any other stations of the kind where the complex has been preserved in its original form," Pavel Filin noted.
Tikhaya Bay is just part of a large-scale effort to preserve the Russian Arctic's scientific and historical heritage. Over recent years, over missions to clean the Arctic from waste accumulated there since the exploration times, experts have found and delivered to the mainland many unique exhibits, including a 1937 all-terrain vehicle ordered by Ivan Papanin, other equipment from early expeditions, and household items that belonged to the North's indigenous peoples. These objects presently are at the Patriot Park in Kronstadt, where an Arctic exploration museum may appear soon.