MURMANSK, June 5. /TASS/. The Clean Arctic public environmental project's first expedition to Spitsbergen departed from Murmansk. A group of 15 people went to the Norwegian archipelago, the project headquarters told TASS.
"The Professor Molchanov scientific expedition vessel will take the volunteers to the archipelago. This is the project's first environmental mission to the island. It was two years ago that the volunteers planned to go to Spitsbergen, but back then the geopolitical situation did not allow them doing so," the headquarters said.
The project's leader Andrey Nagibin noted it was the biggest challenge to get to the archipelago. "We attempted getting there three years ago, but at that time there was no direct flight from Murmansk to Spitsbergen, and we would have travelled via Norway. Not a single person from our team was given a Schengen visa. This time, everything has turned out well. In four days, we will go ashore Spitsbergen to start cleaning up Russian villages," he said.
The team to Spitsbergen features volunteers from Moscow, Kaluga, Lipetsk, Murmansk, Belgorod, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Yakutia Regions and from the Republic of Belarus. They will have to clean up the environmental damage accumulated during the Soviet period of the island's development, mainly scrap metal. Cleanup missions will be in the Russian villages of Barentsburg and Piramida, and additionally the volunteers will clean up the coastline.
