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Budget of Russia's Antarctic Expedition Up 15 Percent
The consolidated budget of Russia’s Antarctic Expedition (RAE) has grown by roughly 15 percent to 2.4 billion rubles, the 53rd RAE chief Vyacheslav Martyanov told ITAR-TASS a day before the flagman of Academician Fedorov polar flotilla was due to leave St. Petersburg for Antarctica.
“The project to construct a new outpost of Russia at Progress station, Antarctica, will get 108 million rubles till this year-end,” specified the representative of Rosgidromet’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute. The additional funds appropriated from the federal budget to the effect will “widen the scale of sixth continent’s scientific development, advance research and natural experiments to the qualitatively new level.”
“We have a real chance, for instance, to revive Russkaya and Leningradskaya seasonal stations at the insufficiently explored Pacific coast of the sixth continent,” Martyanov said. “The stations were closed for lack of funding in the 80s of past century. Now we are intending to install meteorological and geophysical equipment there.”
Acting in the framework of the World Polar Year, Martyanov went on, Russia’s polar explorers are also planning “a unique operation for penetrating into the Vostok freshwater relic lake hidden by the ice coat of nearly four kilometers at the Antarctic cap.”
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