(fomag.ru/TASS) - The scientific expeditions of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SB RAS) in the Nornickel's industrial regions will continue after studying the materials collected over three years, according to Andrey Grachev, vice-president of Nornickel, quoted by TASS on Friday.
"So much material has been accumulated over these three years, it would still need to be studied. It takes time to get acquainted, analyze, draw conclusions, and then proceed to a new stage," Grachev said at the Arctic: Present and Future forum.
He also noted that cooperation with scientists in any case will be continued in 2023.
In 2020, for the first time in recent years, the SB RAS sent a large scientific expedition to Taimyr at the invitation of Nornickel to conduct a large-scale study of the territory and assess the impact of the fuel spill at Norilsk CHPP-3 on the environment. The main research areas of the second expedition in 2021 were surface waters, soils and bottom sediments, vegetation and animals, and permafrost soils. It included scientists from 11 research institutes in Norilsk, Yakutsk, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk and Barnaul. As a result of the expedition, they developed recommendations for further cleaning the territory from pollution. In 2022, scientists from 14 scientific organizations from Novosibirsk, Tyumen, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Yakutsk came to field research. One of the main tasks is to assess the quality of reclamation measures and determine the amount of oil product residues.
In addition, the Baseline Biodiversity Study began in 2022, a part of the cooperation between Nornickel and the SB RAS, which began in 2020 and expanded into three regions since the Great Norilsk Expedition. The purpose of the current study is to determine the company's areas of influence and to assess the state of biodiversity in the regions where Nornickel operates. The research will form the basis of the corporate system for managing the impact on biodiversity and the development of programs for its conservation and monitoring.
