Seriously worried about Arctic environment

Deputy Director of the Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor Mikhail Flint says he is seriously worried about the negative consequences of economic activity on the shelves in the Arctic. - Unregulated navigation, active construction, and irrational mining may turn these sensitive systems into a heap of waste, which will be very hard to clean up. Any intervention into these systems is dangerous, Professor Flint says. Flint was the head of last Octobers’ Arctic expedition on the research vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh to the Kara Sea, east of Novaya Zemlya. According to the researchers report from last years’ expedition the effects of climate changes in the Arctic is dramatically. In general, in the last 12 years, the Arctic’s ice cover has been reduced by 25%-27%, while ice has become thinner. In 2006-2007, it decreased by 1.5 million square kilometers. This was an unprecedented reduction in the 50 years of monitoring. It was caused by many hydrologic and hydro-physical consequences of changes in the global temperature, the Russian researchers write.