The Karpinsky Institute's Shelf Party concluded its field season, having completely finished working in the White Sea.

At the beginning of September, the staff of the Shelf Party of the Regional Geoecology and Marine Geology Department, the Centre for Marine Geology, Lithogeodynamics and Mineralogy of Sedimentary Basins, completed all the assigned geological tasks in the Eastern Solovetskaya Salma Strait.

Seabed surveys were carried out as part of the project on the State Monitoring of Subsurface Conditions in the Russian Federation in 2023-2025 (onshore-offshore zones of the White, Barents and Baltic Seas).

The aim of the research was to assess the current state of hazardous exogenous geological processes and to predict their changes based on monitoring.

The studies were carried out on the research vessel ‘Professor Zenkevich’ by a team of three people: team leader Oleg Dron, chief geologist of the party Alexander Sergeev and geophysicist Danila Fateev.

The work included geological bottom sediment sampling, continuous seismo-acoustic profiling, side-scan sonar and underwater tele-photo profiling.

A total of 100 linear kilometres of continuous seismo-acoustic profiling and side-scan sonar were conducted at the survey site, and bucket bottom sampling was conducted at 20 stations. The data obtained made it possible to identify sites of seafloor landslide formation confined to the steepest slopes in the highly dissected bottom topography of the Eastern Solovetskaya Salma Strait, and to identify zones of gas-saturated sea bottom sediments.

The results of the field work will be shown on maps of manifestation and activity of exogenous geological processes in the White Sea onshore-offshore zone.