Completed 1st stage of Arctic Connect offshore survey

Vladivostok, November 6 - Neftegaz.RU. ROSGEO and MegaFon announced completion of the offshore surveys’ 1st stage under the project of laying an underwater line from Europe to Asia. The research vessel Professor Logachev came to Vladivostok after the expedition had been finished.

During the expedition Professor Logachev’s team studied 6500 km area of the Northern Sea Route with the most severe ice conditions. The line observations were done with the remote geophysical environment-friendly methods such as multi-beam echosounding, side scan sonar and subbottom acoustic profiler. The depths of working areas ranged from 30 m to 613 m.

“Professor Logachev overcame over 16 000 km in 105 days of this unique expedition started late July in St. Petersburg. The vessel and its crew successfully carried out acquisition of the Northern Sea Route bottom of 6 seas - the Barents, Kara, Laptev, East Siberian, Chukchi and Bering, - said Sergey Gorkov, General Director. - Project team through its great coordination and high professionalism overcame all difficulties and completed the work significantly ahead of schedule despite the complicated Arctic conditions.”

Ice situation of the Arctic Ocean was also advantageous and added to the high latitudes research with no ice-breaking support.



“The 1st stage of work is completed. Winter-Spring 2020-2021 ROSGEO experts will process collected data. Next year we will complete the survey’s second stage and explore the rock bottom along the route. The results will make us choose an optimum route to lay the cable along the Russian Arctic. Plus, we will pick the construction areas for the channels to the shore,” noted Gevork Vermishyan, CEO of MegaFon.

In June, MegaFon and ROSGEO signed a 3-year MOU: since then ROSGEO is a key MegaFon partner for the offshore engineering under the Arctic Connect project.

Arctic Connect will tie the continents of up to 85% population of the world with the fiber-optic line. It will provide the fastest signal with minimal latency. The line with a 200 Tbit/s capability will cope with the growing world data traffic. The sideline connections built from the base line will provide communication services for the Arctic and Far East consumers including the fuel and energy industries. The main outcome expected is rapid socio-economic development of the region.