Abstract
The Project aims at developing a geophysical observation system on drifting ice floes with the purpose of studying the lithosphere structure in the Arctic Regions. Exploration of the Arctic region is actual task that affects political and economic interests of several country. The knowledge of the lithosphere deep structure beneath the Arctic Ocean is necessary to reconstruct the stages of the regional geological evolution, which, in turn, provides important information for exploration of new mineral deposits and to understand their origin. Although the Arctic attracts much attention, the scientific investigations there advance quite slowly. The harsh climatic conditions and large expenses slow down realization of the fieldwork in high latitude areas. Therefore, scientists from over the world looks for new technologies, which could optimize and reduce the costs of the fieldworks that aimed at investigation of the geological structure beneath the Arctic Ocean. The main task of the Project is to develop the methodology of long-term multidisciplinary geophysical observations that are meant to study structure of the crust and offshore seismicity in the Polar Regions. To this proposes, the observation systems have to be adopted to the conditions of the deep sea covered by paleocrystic floes and should take into account drift of the ice floes. In the framework of the Project, the prototypes of such observation systems will be developed and tested in the natural conditions on ice of the Arctic Ocean and in other water reservoirs. Here, instead of standard methods, we propose performing complicated, but more efficient experiments with deployment of various geophysical equipment of the ice floes. The drift of the ice floes will provide the movement of the instruments above study area and thus will improve data coverage. The observation systems of the passive seismological and magnetotelluric sounding methods supplemented by the electromagnetic sounding method with innovative controlled source will be designed for installation on top of the drifted ice floes. The practical implementation of this set of the methods will be significantly less expensive than currently used technologies of active seismic survey, for example.