ARKHANGELSK, September 23. /TASS Correspondent Irina Skalina/. A commemorative plaque was unveiled on the Northern Dvina River Embankment near the Laverov Federal Research Center for Integrated Arctic Studies (the Russian Academy of Sciences' Urals Branch) to pay tribute to famous Soviet and Russian scientist, geophysicist, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Felix Yudakhin (1934-2011), a TASS correspondent reported.
"Yudakhin has laid most directions that exist at the Arkhangelsk Scientific Center. Being <...> a person who has a comprehensive view, he used to say: we need biology, chemistry, we need geology. Nowadays, a number of laboratories in the center have kept the names and structures that existed under Felix Yudakhin," the center's Director Ivan Bolotov told TASS. "He has, in fact, revived academic science here. Before the Great Patriotic War, everything was evacuated from Arkhangelsk to Syktyvkar, and we had to create everything from scratch under his leadership. Without him, academic science wouldn't be here as it is now."
Yudakhin is a specialist in deep structure and modern geodynamics of the lithosphere, in seismicity, seismic zoning, and geo-ecology problems of the northern territories. He was engaged in fundamental geological research and he offered methods to study deep geological structure, thanks to which the Soviet Union discovered new deposits of tin, mercury, antimony, gold, and thermal waters. For a long time, he worked in the Kyrgyz Geophysical Expedition, and further on at the Kyrgyz Republic's Academy of Sciences.
Discovery of Arctic seismicity
The scientist has proved that the Arctic is seismic, and that this needs to be studied.
"Continuous seismic monitoring by installed long-term stations performing data transmission in the north - this started with Felix Yudakhin. Seismic stations were recording earthquakes. Unfortunately, without him already, we set up seismic stations on Franz Josef Land, on Novaya Zemlya, on Severnaya Zemlya. The data is transmitted continuously to our seismology laboratory," Galina Antonovskaya, leading the center's Seismology Laboratory, told TASS.
The memorial sign features the scientist's bas-relief portrait; a broken silhouette of the Tien Shan mountain range symbolizes Yudakhin's work in Kyrgyzstan. The earthquake wave is engraved under the mountain range image. "This is not just any earthquake, this is the earthquake that occurred in the Arctic, and it was recorded by the Klimovskaya seismic station," the laboratory's leader explained.
Klimovskaya was founded in 2003 as the first station of the Arkhangelsk seismic network.
In Arkhangelsk, Yudakhin managed a major restructure of the Institute of Environmental Problems of the North (the Russian Academy of Sciences' Urals Branch) to launch new priority scientific areas: geophysics, geology, seismology, environmental radiology, geochemistry, biodiversity, and others. The institute has built up expedition activities and cooperation with research institutions in Russia and abroad. All research infrastructures have been upgraded.
Arkhangelsk hosts the Yudakhin Readings in memory of the outstanding scientist.