ST. PETERSBURG, April 13. /TASS/. A new airfield for heavy cargo aircraft was commissioned on the Severnaya Zemlya Archipelago's Bolshevik Island in the Russian Arctic. The new airfield will be a key element for handling supplies to Arctic expeditions and Russia's biggest hydro-meteorology station - Cape Baranov Ice Base, where the runway is located, the press service of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI, St. Petersburg) told reporters.
"The new runway will become a key link in supplies and personnel rotation for Arctic high-latitude expeditions. Aircraft carrying cargo and people will land at the Cape Baranov Ice Base station, and then deliveries can be carried out by planes or helicopters to a drifting station or an expedition vessel," the press service quoted AARI's Director Alexander Makarov as saying.
Unlike many other Arctic and Antarctic airfields, the new runway on the Bolshevik Island is located not on a glacier, but on the frozen ground. Thus, the people working there must assure the runway is firm and strong enough. The team of polar explorers has coped successfully with the task, and the snow-soil airfield now can receive cargo aircraft of any class.
The new airfield will be used to serve the North Pole drifting expedition, which was resumed a year earlier after a long break. The airfield will be used to deliver necessary cargo to the expedition, and to serve the rotation of personnel working on the North Pole ice-resistant platform for months. The airfield on the Bolshevik Island will be a main logistics link between the mainland and the drifting ice floe.
The construction of AARI's permanent base on Severnaya Zemlya began in 1986. The plan was to have there an observatory and various infrastructures, including an airfield. In the early 1990s, the project's financing was cut, and until 1996 the station operated as the Cape Baranov tourist campsite. Later on, the station was mothballed, and works to revive it started in 2013. Presently the station is working in a regular mode, and the institute's scientists are engaged in a wide range of studies there.
The Cape Baranov base's reviving was connected with the North Pole - 40 expedition on a drifting ice floe. When the ice floe's destruction was quite probable, the polar explorers were evacuated, and the mothballed station on the Bolshevik Island hosted the scientists till the expedition was completed. The North Pole - 41 expedition continues that scientific program. The expedition on board the newest North Pole ice-resistant platform began in 2022.