Russian scientists have launched a greenhouse gas monitoring system

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MOSCOW, December 28 Scientists have begun creating a climate monitoring system for the Russian Arctic seas; a module for monitoring currents is equipped at the drifting polar station «North Pole-41» greenhouse gases, reported the press service of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute.
“Scientists of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute began creating a system of “Climatic and environmental monitoring of the Russian Arctic seas.” In 2023, an observation module for greenhouse gas flows was equipped at the drifting polar station “North Pole-41” in the high-latitude Arctic and the observation platform was modernized on the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago,» the report says.

The institute noted that observational data demonstrate an increase in average annual concentrations of carbon dioxide in the Arctic atmosphere and its absorption by the waters of the Arctic Ocean. The observed effect was caused by a combination of factors, the main one of which was global warming.

“The need to control greenhouse gases is associated with assessing the rate of warming. In the Arctic, the climate is warming two to three times faster than anywhere else on the planet. And it is greenhouse gases, or more precisely, changes in their concentration in the atmosphere, that accelerate and intensify cyclical processes,” — the press service of AANI director Alexander Makarov quotes.
According to the institute, at the next stage, scientists expect to expand the network of observations of climate gas flows. In the future, a network of drifting buoys in the offshore and coastal parts of the Russian Arctic will be added to the already existing complexes for recording the CO2 content in the atmosphere at AARI stations, which will allow the autonomous continuous transmission of information on the state of the environment according to specified parameters via satellite communication channels. This will significantly improve understanding of the processes occurring in winter, when almost all Russian Arctic seas are covered with ice impassable for research vessels.
The ice-resistant platform «North Pole» has the functionality of a research center and is intended for year-round expeditions in the Arctic Ocean. It resumed the traditional operation of drifting stations in the Arctic region. Previously, scientists of drifting polar expeditions lived and worked on ice floes.