Russia has started a very large-scale project to exploit a vast gas deposit on one of its northern peninsulas, Yamal.

This is a joint project of the state and several private companies, which will include building a gas processing plant, a sea port and an airport. The sea port will be one of the largest in Russia. It is planned that from 2018, 15 mln tons of liquefied natural gas will be transported through this port every year. The plant is planned to be built in 4 years from now.

See more at The Voice of Russia.

A trip along Yamal

Didn't you get enough about Yamal in our last entry?? Let's continue our trip along Yamal and get to know more and more with the following video.

On the land of herders

It’s the herders’ camp in Krasnoselkup village in the Yamalo-Nents Autonomous District of Russia. This place is often called “the region of untold fur wealth”.

Let's take a tour together via EnglishRussia.

Gugara

Co-directors Andrzej Dybczak and Jacek Naglowski's sobering anthropological documentary Gugara profiles the Evenks, a scarcely-known tribe in the deep heart of Siberia that is not only dying off with alarming rapidity, but quickly losing its culture and fading into social oblivion for that reason. Naglowski and Dybczak travel to the Evenk-populated village of Tutonchany, with a particularly strong emphasis on profiling the Hukachar family (whose son is now employed as a physical education instructor) and another clan where the daughter has become a born-again Christian and the patriarch has withered into a drunken ne'er-do-well. The filmmakers suggest, none too subtly, that the arrival of Christianity and western mass culture (evidenced via the family's TV sets) have each contributed to the decimation of the local culture. The title, when translated, refers to the sound of reindeer bells

Land-cover and Land-use Changes on the Yamal Peninsula

"Land-cover and Land-use Changes on the Yamal Peninsula, Russia" is framed within NASA’s Land-Cover and Land-Use Change (LCLUC) Program. It contributes to NASA’s global-change observations regarding the consequences of the decline in the Arctic sea ice and the greening of terrestrial vegetation that is occurring in northern latitudes. The work is also part of the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI). It addresses the NEESPI science questions regarding the local and hemispheric effects of anthropogenic changes to land use and climate in northern Eurasia.

The overarching goal of the research is to use remote-sensing technologies to examine how the terrain and anthropogenic factors of reindeer herding and resource development, combined with the climate variations on the Yamal Peninsula, affect the spatial and temporal patterns of vegetation change and how those changes are in turn affecting traditional herding by indigenous people of the region.

The Yamal Peninsula in northern Russia has undergone extensive anthropogenic disturbance and transformation of vegetation cover over the past 20 years due to gas and oil development and overgrazing by the Nenets reindeer herds. It has been identified as a “hot spot” for both Arctic climate change and land-use change.

In the following posts we will be pleased to spread some remarkable results from these researches.

Gas pipelines in Western Siberia and prices of gas

With the following post, we want to complete the previous information given about gas pipelines in Yamal Peninsula and Western Siberia. In the following link a detailed scheme of gas pipelines in Western Siberia is provided.

A complete report about gas prices in Russia can be obtained via East European Gas Analisys.

EU Project Tundra

We are pleased to present you one of the most relevant projects carried out in the scientific community about environment and climate in the tundra region. The TUNDRA project is supported by the Environment and Climate Programme of the European Commission, Climatology and Natural Hazards.

TUNDRA stands for Tundra Degradation in the Russian Arctic. It is a research project funded for a period of 3 years (1998-2000) by the IVth Framework 'Environment and Climate' Programme of the European Commission. TUNDRA studies the effects of Global Change in the East-European Russian Arctic. The magnitude of expected climatic changes and the fragility of the environment make the Arctic a priority area to study the effects of global change.

The main focus of TUNDRA is to assess feedback processes to the global climate system that originate in the Arctic. Emphasis is given to changes in greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere and in freshwater runoff to the Arctic Ocean taking into account Global Warming, industrial pollution and the public perception of environmental degradation. The project is interdisciplinary in nature and involves climatologists, soil scientists, ecologists, palaeoecologists, hydrologists, pollution specialists and social anthropologists from Denmark, Finland, Russia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

Tundra project in the web