Russia to build research center on Svalbard
Russia plans to build a research center for monitoring of the environment in the Arctic on the archipelago of Svalbard.
The plan is to modernize already existing buildings and have the new research center up and running by 2013, RIA Novosti reports.
According to Valeriy Martyshchenko from the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring, the center will be developing projects of geophysical, hydrologic and geologic kind and will also contain a station for reception of satellite data and rooms for scientific conferences.
The establishment of the center is part of a large-scaled federal program called “World Ocean”.
In 2009, Svalbard had a population of 2,753, of which 423 were Russian and Ukrainian, Wikipedia informs. In the only Russian settlement on Svalbard, Barentsburg, mining is the only livelihood, while the neighboring Norwegian settlement of Longyearbyen in addition to mining also has a well-developed tourist industry and a significant presence of polar researchers.
