Moscow airports delay or cancel more than 100 flights in storm

NDTV: Moscow international airports on Friday delayed or cancelled more than 100 flights due to stormy weather.

A weather warning issued by the emergencies ministry in Moscow predicted storms and strong winds of more than 50 miles per hour that could topple trees and bring down power lines.

At around 10 pm (1900 GMT), 73 flights were delayed and eight cancelled at Domodedovo airport to the south of the city, according to Yandex search engine's timetable service.

A further 40 flights were delayed and eight cancelled at the northern Sheremetyevo airport while eight were delayed at Vnukovo airport to the west, Yandex said.

Aeroflot carrier, based at Sheremetyevo, on Twitter warned passengers that "currently at Sheremetyevo due to complex weather conditions, flights are being delayed on arrival and departure."...

The control tower at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport, shot by DME Airport, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Northern fires caused almost a quarter of global forest loss, contributed to global carbon emissions

Karl Mathiesen in the Guardian (UK): Vast areas of forest in Canada and Russia were lost to fire in 2013, according to new satellite data. But there were encouraging signs from Indonesia, where the loss of forest cover fell to the lowest level in a decade.

Scientists from Global Forest Watch collated 400,000 images of the Earth’s surface to map the world’s forests down to a resolution of 30 metres. Their findings showed that overall the world lost 18m hectares of forest in 2013.

Between 2011 and 2013 fires in the boreal forests of Canada and Russia accounted for almost a quarter of global forest losses. Some of this will return, but northern forests are particularly slow to recover after fire.

Boreal forests are one of the world’s great carbon sinks. But scientists predict that climate change will cause them to burn more often and with greater intensity, unlocking the carbon stored in the wood and soil. Already they are burning more than at any point in the past 10,000 years.

Dr Nigel Sizer, study co-author and director of the forests programme for the World Resources Institute (WRI), said the increase of fires in northern forests had worrying implications for the climate. “If global warming is leading to more fires in boreal forests, which in turn leads to more emissions from those forests, which in turn leads to more climate change. This is one of those positive feedback loops that should be of great concern to policy makers.”...

A 2012 wild fire in Siberia, shot by Савин Игорь Игоревич, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Russian scientists say climate change to blame for mysterious Siberia craters

Guardian (UK) via AFP: Russian scientists have now discovered seven giant craters in remote Siberia, a geologist told AFP on Thursday, adding that the mysterious phenomenon was believed to be linked to climate change.

The discovery of an enormous chasm in a far northern region known to locals as “the end of the world” in July last year prompted speculation it had been caused by a meteorite or even aliens.

 “We have just learnt that in Yakutia, new information has emerged about a giant crater 1km [0.6 miles] in diameter,” the deputy director of the Oil and Gas Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vasily Bogoyavlensky, told AFP.

He said this brought to seven the number of reported pits. “Footage allows us to identify minimum seven craters, but in fact there are plenty more,” he said.

All of the craters have been discovered in the remote, energy-rich Yamalo-Nenetsky region in north-western Siberia. Scientists say that rather than aliens or meteorites, the holes are caused by the melting of underground ice in the permafrost, which has possibly been sped up by rising temperatures due to global warming....

A coat of arms from the Krasnoyarsk District

In Russia, a drying lake threatens an 'era of water wars'

Angelina Davydova in Reuters via the Thomson Reuters Foundation: In Russia's Siberian south, near the border of Mongolia, the world's largest freshwater lake is shrinking. The surrounding communities depend on Lake Baikal, which contains about one-fifth of the earth's unfrozen freshwater reserves, for their power, water and livelihoods.

But in the past four months the lake’s water level has dropped so low that experts are calling it a crisis – one they warn could lead to conflicts in Russia over water. The lake is now at its lowest level in over 30 years and experts predict it will keep dropping until melting mountain snow and spring rains begin to recharge the lake around late April or mid-May.

The problem, scientists and environmentalists say, is a combination of climate change and growing use of hydropower. During last year's unusually dry summer and autumn, the lake got only 67 percent of the freshwater inflow it normally receives; experts predict in the first quarter of 2015 that figure will fall to 50 percent.

...Lake Baikal's dramatic drying already is causing tensions between the two regions that rely on it. In the Buryat Republic, upstream of the lake, wells are running empty and the area's fishing industry is struggling with decreasing fish populations.

..."Welcome to the era of water wars in Russia," said Alexander Kolotov, Russian coordinator of the international ecological coalition Rivers Without Boundaries. "Water is becoming the country's most valuable resource."....

The village of Enkhaluk on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal, shot by Аркадий Зарубин, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

NASA photographs show eastern basin of Aral Sea totally dry

Isabel Cocoli in Voice of America: New NASA photographs taken by satellite show Central Asia' once-vibrant Aral Sea shrinking to levels possibly not seen in centuries. The images taken in August by the Terra satellite show that the sea's eastern basin, on the border of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, completely empty, the first time in modern times, said Philip Micklin, a well-known geographer and professor emeritus of Western Michigan University and an Aral Sea expert.

"And it is likely the first time it has completely dried in 600 years, since medieval desiccation associated with diversion of the Amu Darya [river] to the Caspian Sea," he told NASA. By some accounts, the destruction of the sea is considered one of the world's worst environmental catastrophes.

Once the fourth-largest sea in the world, the Aral has been shrinking since the 1960s when the Soviet Union undertook a major irrigation project to supply the arid plains of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

The region's two main rivers — the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya — were tapped to irrigate water-intensive crops like cotton and others in the arid Central Asian desert. The desert bloomed in many places, but at the expense of the lake, which has shriveled, destroying ecosystems, decimating a vibrant fishing industry and leaving dozens of communities suffering from poverty and environmentally-induced disease.

Micklin said lower rain and snow fall in the mountains to the east this year  considerably reduced the flow into the Amu Darya feeding the lake. Uzbekistan continues to use the river for its economically-important cotton industry.

As the water receded, the sea has split into two separate sections: the North, or Small, Aral Sea, located within Kazakhstan; and the South, or Large, Aral Sea. The latter split into western and eastern basins.

NASA image of the Aral Sea on August 19, 2014

The most vulnerable populations to climate change: floods, droughts and extreme weather

Catherine Griffin in Science World Report: While climate change can benefit some locations, other areas are more at risk. Now, scientists have taken a look at which sections of the world's population are left most at risk to food shortages and extreme weather events.

Extreme weather events can leave populations with not enough food both in the short- and long-term. That's why scientists decided to take a look at which populations could be most affected by these events. More specifically, they tracked the effects on four countries, including Russia, East Africa, Pakistan and the Philippines, which all experienced extreme weather events that ranged from drought to flooding.

Climate change is expected to increase the intensity and frequency of heatwaves and floods. Although there's no scientific evidence to show that a specific weather event would not have happened without climate change, the risk of the event does indeed increase. In fact, the new findings show that the heat wave that occurred in Russia and the drought that occurred in East Africa were most likely caused by climate change.

"Weather has always affected flood security, particularly for many of the world's poorest people," said John Ingram, one of the lead authors of the new study, in a news release. "Perhaps we think of farmers or fishermen first, but extreme weather will affect many more people in other ways too. While direct measures such as emergency preparedness and the strengthening of response-related institutions is helpful, this study has identified the need for a wider cultural shift to ensure the poorest and most vulnerable are properly protected."...

US Army photo of 2010 flooding in Pakistan

Russia's top cities wake up to need for climate change adaptation

Angelina Davydova in Thomson Reuters Foundation: Russia’s two biggest cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, have started working out how they should adapt to the impacts of climate change, including warmer temperatures, floods and rising sea levels. And it’s not before time, experts say, as scientific data suggests climatic changes in the world’s northern and Arctic regions are occurring more rapidly than elsewhere.

“In Russia, global warming is happening even quicker than average on Earth - in some parts of the country, especially in Siberia and in the Arctic, up to two times faster,” said Vladimir Katsov, director of the Voeikov Main Geophysical Observatory in St Petersburg.

In 2013, mean annual rainfall increased by 13 percent from the previous year, and in Ru
ssia’s Far East by as much as 20 percent. This region was badly hit by floods last autumn, with economic costs amounting to $1.4 billion.

Climate change is expected to bring more extreme weather and climate-linked disasters, while having major impacts on food security, forestry and other ecosystem services. Worse still, the melting of the Arctic and permafrost could have a multiplier effect, causing even more greenhouse gases to be released into the atmosphere.

In early June, natural disasters swept across eastern Russia, from floods in the Altai Region of south Siberia to forest fires in neighbouring regions of Eastern Siberia and the Far East.  In the summer of 2010, forest fires and the worst heat wave in Central Russia for 130 years caused heavy smog in Russia’s capital, Moscow, resulting in around 11,000 excess deaths....

Aerial view of St. Petersburg by ERIC SALARD, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license

Fighting hits water supply in east Ukraine city

Space Daily via AFP: Up to one million people face water shortages in eastern Ukraine as workers battle to repair pipes damaged by fighting in rebel-held Donetsk, a city spokesman said on Thursday. "Today the water supply is limited and a full supply is being provided only at certain times," Maxim Rovinsky, spokesman for Donetsk mayor Oleksandr Lukyanchenko, told AFP.

The city is the largest rebel stronghold in eastern Ukraine and the epicentre of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic. Rovinsky said water would reach residents in five-hour stretches every morning and evening, in restrictions that went into force on Tuesday.

The region is suffering from severe water shortages after weeks of fierce fighting between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian troops damaged vital infrastructure.

There has been no water supply to the battle-ravaged northern city of Slavyansk -- which has a population of 120,000 -- since the start of the month. Many other towns have had their supply restricted. "As of today the water supply to Donetsk is down 20 percent," Rovinsky said....

The Kalmius River in Donetsk, Ukraine, shot by AndrijKo.ukr, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Hundreds evacuated as heavy floods sweep across Siberia

RT: Hundreds of people have been evacuated and tens of thousands left without power after heavy floods struck southern Siberia. A state of emergency has been introduced in three regions. Those areas are the Altai region, Khakassia Republic, and Altai Republic, said Russian Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov, who added that a “high alert” has been issued for two other regions - Tuva Republic and Buryatia Republic.

Meanwhile, Puchkov also noted that other regions are at risk from the flooding - such as Sakha (Yakutia) Republic and the Amur region – due to the fact that rivers in southern Siberia have responded quickly to the heavy rains.

In the Altai Republic alone, the flooding has already destroyed 230 kilometers of roads and 1.5 kilometers of a federal highway which links Russia with Mongolia. Fifteen bridges were washed away. Heavy floods swallowed up nearly 1,000 houses in Altai Republic, where up to 3,500 people - including 927 children - live. Hundreds are now homeless and have been forced to seek shelter in temporary accommodation centers. Emergency services have confirmed that one person has died and three are missing. Several areas in the republic have been left without electricity after heavy rain brought down 48 utility poles.

On Saturday, the ministry launched a massive rescue operation in the affected regions, evacuating hundreds of people. However, many domestic animals didn’t survive, according to local officials. A local emergencies ministry estimates that nearly 4,000 houses have been damaged or destroyed by water in the affected regions. Roughly 8,000 people have been forced to evacuate....

A map of central Siberia, public domain

New Egyptian satellite launched into orbit over Kazakhstan

Sara Aggour in the Daily News (Egypt): A new Egyptian telecommunication satellite is scheduled to launch on Wednesday from Kazakhstan at 8.20pm, Moscow time, by Russia’s Baikonur spaceport. This is the second Egyptian satellite to enter service.

Russian News Agency ITAR-TASS reported that the satellite is equipped with advanced technologies that are used to take “visible-range and infrared photographs”. The data collected by the satellite will be used in agriculture, ecological and geographical research. The Russian news agency quoted an anonymous source from the Russian space agency Roscosmos as saying that the satellite will separate from the rocket at 8.28pm, Moscow time.

Egyptian cabinet spokesman Hossam Al-Qaweish said that the new satellite will serve the industrial, agricultural, mineral, planning and environmental fields in Egypt, state-run news agency MENA reported. Qaweish added that the satellite will also help support development projects in the Arab region.

According to the Russian agency, the first Egyptian satellite was launched from the same Russian spaceport in 2007; however, “the contract was lost in 2011”, according to ITAR-TASS. The new agency added that Egyptian specialists stated at the time that the first satellite was an experimental project with a maximum life service of five years....

Weather swap: Is America’s ‘polar vortex’ linked to record warm winter in Russia?

Russia Today: As Americans kept struggling with extreme cold and snow brought on by a ‘polar vortex,’ people in central Russia were puzzled by warm rainy weather that swept all the snow away. Now weather experts say the two anomalies are in fact connected.

As residents of the US and Canada were surprised by the frigid cold dipping below minus 30 degrees Celsius, Russians were also surprised by the January weather, with temperatures in Moscow rising some 11 degrees above average and melting the snowy “New Year’s spirit” away.

Central Europe also experienced sudden warm-up, and trees in Moldovan capital Chisinau got confused to the point their buds started swelling, apparently in anticipation of the blooming season. One of the reasons for the snowless January in Russia and the coldest winter in the last 17 years for the US is in fact the shifting of the Arctic Cyclone towards North America, Greg Carbin, warning meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told Itar-Tass news agency.

The cyclone may come to Russia in a week or two, Carbin said, predicting that the temperatures in the country could soon leap back to below zero and even below average.

Russian meteorologists have said that the gradual return of winter is to be expected even sooner. According to the Hydrometeorological Centre of Russia, frost and snow is coming back, starting from this weekend and reaching minus 17 degrees Celsius on Wednesday night....

A 1919 snowstorm in New York City

Rescue of stranded Antarctic ship stalls--shades of Shackleton!

Terra Daily via AFP: A Chinese icebreaker has failed to break through thick ice to free a ship carrying scientists and tourists stranded off Antarctica, forcing Australian authorities to look at other rescue options Saturday. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA), which is coordinating the rescue of the Russian passenger ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy, said the icebreaker came within six-and-a-half nautical miles of the ship but had to stop.

"The Chinese vessel unfortunately encountered some heavy ice that it's not capable of breaking through," AMSA spokeswoman Andrea Hayward-Maher told AFP. "So unfortunately it won't be able to continue through to the Akademik Shokalskiy. It's making its way back."

"The rescue... unfortunately has stalled."  The Russian ship, with 74 people on board, has been trapped in ice about 100 nautical miles east of the French base Dumont d'Urville since Tuesday.

The Chinese vessel came tantalisingly close to the trapped ship, with those on board reporting they could see it in the distance, but was forced to turn back to open sea once it realised it could not break through.

"At the horizon in the east I can see the Chinese icebreaker that we were hoping was going to be here within hours cutting us a path out of this place but it just couldn't make it," science journalist Andrew Luck-Baker onboard the Russian ship told the BBC.

It slowed down to about half a knot and has decided to go back to where the sea begins and wait for the arrival of an Australian icebreaker. The idea now is for the two of them to come together in parallel towards us, cutting a wider path."

Three vessels with icebreaking capability, including Australia's Antarctic resupply ship Aurora Australis and French vessel L'Astrolabe, were ordered to the area to attempt to rescue the vessel once the distress signal was sent....

Frank Hurley's photograph of the Endurance being crushed by the ice in Antarctica, 1915 

Quandary over abandoned Soviet croplands

Quirin Schiermeier in Nature: The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 heralded the end of many unprofitable communist industries, along with unprecedented changes in land use. As the free-market economy took hold, large swathes of Soviet cropland were abandoned by farmers and reclaimed by nature, causing a headache for today’s policy-makers. Should it be replanted to feed hungry mouths, or left wild to act as a substantial sink for polluting carbon dioxide?

The issue resurfaced this month after a study suggested that the area of cropland abandoned since 1990 in western Russia, Belarus and Ukraine has been severely underestimated. According to figures based on regional sowing statistics, more than one-quarter of former agricultural land in the region is idle. This equates to about 31 million hectares — or an area the size of Poland — and is more than three times the area estimated in 2009 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization mainly on the basis of land-use observations from space.

...“The Soviet Union strived for complete agricultural self-sufficiency,” says Schierhorn, and this meant farming even low-quality land. He says that grain production in fertile regions is still substantial, but has dropped sharply in less fertile spots. This is mainly because, after 1990, there was a massive decrease in Soviet animal stock, so less need for animal feed, he adds.

Many sites once used to produce feed could today support wheat varieties and other cereals, Schierhorn says. If fully replanted, he estimates the region’s idle land could yield some 90 million tonnes of grain per year — about 35 million tonnes more than Russia’s wheat production in 2013. Recultivating only a portion of the land would buffer Russia against its notoriously erratic yields...

Children digging up frozen potatoes on a collective farm in the Donets Basin, 1933

Amur flooding breaks records in China

Space Daily via AFP: The Amur River which marks the border between China and Russia has experienced its worst flooding in a century, cutting off roads to some areas, Chinese state media said Monday.

The Amur, which China knows as the Heilong River, has risen since mid-August with some middle and lower sections reaching their highest levels since records began in 1896, the Xinhua news agency said.

On Saturday, one station on the river measured a record high water level of 50.62 metres (167 feet), 1.31 metres more than the previous high in 1984, it said.

Another station registered a high of 43.37 metres, also surpassing a 1984 record, Xinhua said....

Confluence of the Amur River (on the right) and the Ussuri River (on the left), in the center there is a part of the Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island (Khabarovsk Krai, Russia).Shot by Ondřej Žváček, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Record floods threaten major city in Russian far east

Terra Daily via AFP: Russians in the Far East on Friday scrambled to contain record floods which have affected more than 50,000 people and threatened to paralyse one of the region's biggest cities.

Heavy rains pounding the Far East over the past weeks swelled local rivers, with floodwaters wreaking havoc in Khabarovsk, a city of nearly 600,000 that sits at the confluence of the Amur and Ussury rivers near a Chinese border.

The military were deployed to help hurriedly erect defences against the floodwaters which halted transport in some areas of the city and reached high-rise residential buildings.

Amid fresh concerns that the Russian government was ill-prepared to handle natural disasters, President Vladimir Putin on Thursday said he would soon personally inspect some of the affected areas....

This aerial view of Khabarovsk gives you an idea of its vulnerability to floods. Shot by MyBigFlight, Wiikimeda Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Cracking ice floe forces Russia to pack up Arctic ice station

Will Englund in the Washington Post: Russia is evacuating a drifting Arctic research station that was supposed to last until September, because the ice it is built on is starting to break up. The cracks are another indication of the rapid decline of the Arctic ice sheet — especially so because the encampment is on the Canadian side of the Arctic Sea, where the ice is oldest and most durable.

“It’s a huge loss for us, and for science,” Vladimir Sokolov, director of the expedition, said in a telephone interview from his office in St. Petersburg. “For us, it is very important to get information about the climate system in the high-latitude Arctic.”

The station — the 40th in a string of North Pole drift stations that began in 1937 — went into operation Oct. 1, later than usual because the leaders of the project had a difficult time finding a sufficiently robust floe to base the camp on. In fact, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the extent of sea ice in September was the lowest on record, 18 percent lower than the previous minimum, in 2007.

Last year’s ice conditions, Sokolov said, forced the Russian researchers to look for a base floe closer to Canada than to their own country.

In years past, drift stations have remained in operation for 12 months or longer, with the exception of 2010, when an early breakup also caused a premature evacuation....

Photo by Patrick Kelley, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Ice-free arctic may be in our future

UMassAmherst Office of News & Media Relations: Analyses of the longest sediment core ever collected on land in the Arctic, recently completed by an international team led by Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, provide “absolutely new knowledge” of Arctic climate from 2.2 to 3.6 million years ago and show that with estimated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) similar to today’s levels, the Arctic was very warm, with no ice sheets.

“While existing geologic records from the Arctic contain important hints about this time period, what we are presenting is the most continuous archive of information about past climate change from the entire Arctic borderlands. As if reading a detective novel, we can go back in time and reconstruct how the Arctic evolved with only a few pages missing here and there,” says Brigham-Grette.

Results of analyses that provide “an exceptional window into environmental dynamics” never before possible were published this week in Science and have “major implications for understanding the pacing and context of how the Arctic transitioned from a forested landscape without ice sheets to the ice- and snow-covered land we know today,” she adds.

Their data come from analyzing sediment cores collected in the winter of 2009 from under ice-covered Lake El’gygytgyn, the oldest deep lake in the northeast Russian Arctic. “Lake E” was formed 3.6 million years ago when a huge meteorite hit the Earth and blasted out an 11-mile (18 km) wide crater. It has been collecting sediment layers ever since. Luckily for geoscientists, it lies in one of the few Arctic areas not eroded by continental glaciers, so a thick, continuous sediment record was left remarkably undisturbed. Cores from Lake E reach back in geologic time nearly 30 times farther than Greenland ice cores that cover the past 140,000 years.

“One of our major findings is that the Arctic was very warm in the Pliocene [~ 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago] when others have suggestedatmospheric CO2 was very much like levels we see today. This could tell us where we are going in the near future. In other words, the Earth system response to small changes in carbon dioxide is bigger than suggested by earlier models,” the authors state....

NASA image showing the location of Lake El'gygytgyn

Russia seeks Baltic pollution partnerships

Terra Daily via UPI: Russia's push to create public-private partnerships as a way to help clean up the polluted Baltic Sea is the focus of an environmental summit in St. Petersburg.

The meeting, to be attended by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and premiers from 10 other Baltic and northern European nations, is being called in part to strengthen international cooperation on tackling the chronic environmental woes of the Baltic, which is plagued by nitrates and phosphates from waste run-off.

The nutrients, contained in fertilizers and sewage, enter the sea from large "spot" sources such as wastewater treatment facilities and also from diffuse sources, such as scattered farm fields. Environmentalists say the pollution is causing the "eutrophication" of the Baltic Sea, though which algae blooms deplete oxygen from the water, triggering fish die-offs and creating a 25,000-square-mile-wide "dead zone" the size of Latvia.

A 2007 action plan developed by the Helsinki Commission of nine Baltic Sea nations has achieved a 40 percent reduction in direct nitrogen and phosphorus discharges as well as a 40 percent decrease in airborne nitrogen emissions. Some 200 Baltic Sea anti-pollution commitments have been at previous summits, including 11 by sovereign states..

A sunset on the Baltic, shot by Kharlosluz, Wikimedia Commons,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Global warming opening up Russia's Arctic

Space Daily via UPI: Russian state-owned energy firms are preparing to move into the country's offshore polar regions. On Jan. 15 Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich's told journalists that the state-controlled Rosneft and Gazprom energy companies are to receive licenses to develop the 12 and 17 arctic continental shelf sectors. The decision is raising concerns among the country's private energy companies that they will be locked out of developing the country's potentially vast arctic hydrocarbon reserves.

Russia's natural resources ministry proposed on Jan. 15 that offshore oil and gas fields on the country's Arctic shelf that isn't wanted by state-controlled firms should be explored and developed by non-state companies.

Private companies have so far failed to break the monopoly of Gazprom and Rosneft on hydrocarbons exploration on Russia's offshore continental maritime shelf, as currently only Russian state-controlled companies, including Rosneft and Gazprom, are allowed to hold offshore licenses in Russian territorial waters, Russkoe Informatsionnoe Agenstvo news agency reported on Tuesday.

Currently energy companies that want to acquire licenses to work on the Russian continental offshore shelf have to have a minimum of 50 percent state ownership and foreign and Russian private companies have to sign contracts with either Gazprom or Rosneft.

In further bad news for Russian private energy firms, Gazprom is not interested in relinquishing to state control the licenses for those offshore fields it is not interested in, according to Gazprom CEO Aleksei Miller, speaking to reporters in Novy Urengoi, above the Arctic Circle....

Three icebreakers, some of them Russian, shot by US Department of "Homeland Security," public domain

Global warming opening up Russia's Arctic

Space Daily via UPI: Russian state-owned energy firms are preparing to move into the country's offshore polar regions. On Jan. 15 Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich's told journalists that the state-controlled Rosneft and Gazprom energy companies are to receive licenses to develop the 12 and 17 arctic continental shelf sectors. The decision is raising concerns among the country's private energy companies that they will be locked out of developing the country's potentially vast arctic hydrocarbon reserves.

Russia's natural resources ministry proposed on Jan. 15 that offshore oil and gas fields on the country's Arctic shelf that isn't wanted by state-controlled firms should be explored and developed by non-state companies.

Private companies have so far failed to break the monopoly of Gazprom and Rosneft on hydrocarbons exploration on Russia's offshore continental maritime shelf, as currently only Russian state-controlled companies, including Rosneft and Gazprom, are allowed to hold offshore licenses in Russian territorial waters, Russkoe Informatsionnoe Agenstvo news agency reported on Tuesday.

Currently energy companies that want to acquire licenses to work on the Russian continental offshore shelf have to have a minimum of 50 percent state ownership and foreign and Russian private companies have to sign contracts with either Gazprom or Rosneft.

In further bad news for Russian private energy firms, Gazprom is not interested in relinquishing to state control the licenses for those offshore fields it is not interested in, according to Gazprom CEO Aleksei Miller, speaking to reporters in Novy Urengoi, above the Arctic Circle....