Expeditions

MMBI conducts expeditionary research all the year round on its research vessels and on vessels of other organizations, using helicopters and motor transport. Destinations of these expeditions are different areas of the Barents, White, Greenland, Kara, Norwegian, East-Siberian, North and Laptev Seas. The geography of investigations is expanded from year to year. During the last years, in addition to the Arctic areas, expeditionary work has been carried out in the Baltic Sea, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. The obtained results constantly replenish the Institute databank, which enables structures and status of different marine biocenoses under the impacts of climatic changes and anthropogenic pressure to be analyzed. The data of many years’ expeditionary investigations have allowed assessing the productivity of Nordic seas. For the first time, the model for the plankton community succession in Arctic seas has been created.
Murmansk Marine Biological Institute has gained wide experience in organizing multidisciplinary oceanographic and biological investigations on board the atomic icebreakers of the Murmansk Marine Shipping Company (since 1996). Several times a year, the Institute conducts winter-spring voyages along the Northern Sea Route. Owing to the obtained data, the scientists have managed to describe for the first time the vital functions of all the units of marine ecosystems – from plankton to mammals (including polar bears) – in the Western Arctic ice.
In the past four decades, marine expeditionary research of MMBI in the Arctic is inextricably linked with the research vessel “Dalnie Zelentsy”.
RV ”Dalnie Zelentsy” (1074 t) is equipped with the satellite navigation system, up-to-date navigation equipment, expedition tools, which includes: a multi-channel telemetric system consisting of a CTD-probe CTD90 (pressure, temperature, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, pH, fluorescence and photosynthetic active radiation), HydroBios MW12 with 12 bathometers and a winch with a cable-rope, two probes-profilographs SEACAT SBE 19 (pressure, temperature, conductivity), CTD probe ME Eco-Memory (pressure, temperature, conductivity), Van-Veen grabs, rectangular box-shaped corers, spectrophotometers, pH-meters, hardware and software for microscopy and etc. The geography of cruses on board RV “Dalnie Zelentsy” is very broad. On its maiden voyage in 1979 the vessel has passed along the Southern Route through the Suez Canal from Vladivostok to Dalnie Zelentsy settlement.

In 2014, an integrated expedition on board RV “Dalnie Zelentsy” was set up and a full-scale study of water areas of Russian shelf seas (the Kara, the Laptev and the East Siberian Seas) was conducted. As a result a unique, having no analogues in the world data on structure and functioning of polar marine ecosystems was obtained. Scientific officers have performed more than 450 ichthyological trawlings (bottom and pelagic), have carried out a full-scale spatial benthic, pelagic, oceanographic, geo-ecological surveying (230 stations) and three-month 24-hour monitoring of the population status of marine mammal, birds and polar bears. Over the 35-year operation period the RV was engaged in more than 200 high-latitude marine expeditions lasting up to 90 days. It sailed over 500 000 nautical miles.
For the expeditionary research activities to be carried out, the Institute uses its seasonal biological stations. Monthly monitoring of coastal species of Cetaceans and Pinnipedia is conducted at Dalnie Zelentsy settlement. Coastal expeditions allow studying features of seals’ behavior and reproduction, assessing parasitologic situation in the sites of mass gathering of mammals, study and cultivating algae in the natural environment.