CHAPTER SIX WHERE IS HIS HARBOR! Theologians engaged in preliminary investigations call Bruno's views heresy. He has a dilemma. He either must admit his guilt, or, by persisting, end up in trouble with the Inquisition. What next? The Holy Office is not the right place for philosophical

Russian soul Gogol did not need to find out whether he was a Little Russian or a Russian - his friends dragged him into disputes about this. In 1844, he responded to Alexandra Osipovna Smirnova’s request this way: “I’ll tell you one word about what kind of soul I have, Khokhlatsky or Russian, because this is how I

RUSSIAN HARBOR

No one has passed the path
Won't take it back...

Nikolay Aseev

Famous and unknown

“If you want to know what people are looking for in that country and why they go there, despite the great danger to life, know that three properties of human nature prompt them to do this: firstly, competition and a penchant for fame, for man tends to rush to places where there is great danger, thanks to which one can gain fame; secondly, curiosity, for also a property of human nature is the desire to see and know the areas about which he was told; thirdly, covetousness is characteristic of man, for people constantly crave money and goods and go where, according to rumors, they can make a profit, despite the great danger that threatens.”

This is what is written in the Scandinavian “Royal Mirror,” a Norwegian monument of the 13th century, and these words refer to the Arctic, to “that country” about which, in essence, very, very few knew. But even then, at the very beginning of Arctic voyages, people who were in the distant midnight region assigned a modest third place to “material incentive,” and the first two were the desire for fame and the thirst for knowledge. This is exactly how the bravest of the brave - the Russian Pomors and the Scandinavian Vikings - reasoned, although in fact they acted “on the third point”: they went to polar ice for fishing for fish and sea animals, for walrus tusks and “soft junk” - furs. Probably, if you wish, you can find and list motivating reasons, compelling motives, convincing arguments, explain certain actions, succinctly and exhaustively summarized in the “Royal Mirror”. And yet the main thing is the eternal and immense craving for the new, the unknown.

Otherwise, you won’t understand much. It is hard to understand why Henry Hudson took his son with him when setting off on a voyage to the North Pole. On June 23, 1611, mutinous sailors put Hudson, his son and several loyal sailors in a boat and left them to die in the icy sea.

It’s hard to understand why Swedish engineer Salomon Andre flew to the pole. When flying away, he left a short testament: “My flight is fraught with dangers that have not even been noted in the history of aeronautics. My presentiment tells me that this terrible journey is tantamount to death for me!” I wrote it, sealed it in an envelope and flew out on July 11, 1897. hot-air balloon"Eagle" headed north, but did not reach the cherished point - it died on one of the islands of the Spitsbergen archipelago.

It is impossible to understand what forces carried away the terminally ill senior lieutenant Russian fleet Georgy Yakovlevich Sedov to the same North Pole. He took food with him only for the road “there”... Losing consciousness, no longer able to move, he ordered his two companions to carry him on sledges. Delirious, dying, Sedov did not take his eyes off the compass needle: he was afraid that the sailors would arbitrarily turn south! On March 5, 1914, Sedov died nine hundred kilometers short of the North Pole.

How many of them there were, famous and unknown, striving for the reserved, mysterious land lying under the constellation Ursa Major (which is called “Arktos” in Greek)! The sacred books of Hindus and Persians, poems of the ancient Greeks, Norwegian sagas and Pomeranian epics, artless lines of travel diaries of pioneers and seafarers, solid reports of large polar expeditions have been telling about them for more than two millennia.

They traveled on sailing and steam ships, on dogs and on foot; flew to balloons, airships and airplanes; they found themselves in a desperate situation, got scurvy, got frostbite, were forced to spend disastrous winters, sank to the bottom along with their horses, boats, longboats, wooden boats, died on a nameless shore, having previously eaten the last dog... But they kept going and going to north, to frozen, lifeless lands, into drifting ice fields, leaving at the most extreme point they reached a note in a tin and a piece of the national flag. And in the end, having traveled many thousands of kilometers by land and sea, they reached the Pole, populated the wild shores, put glacier-covered archipelagos on the map and eventually mastered it great path, which today is called Northern Sea.

The history of the Arctic contains many names. These names appear on geographical map, and there is no higher reward for the traveler. Any schoolchild is familiar with the Laptev Sea and Cape Dezhnev (it should rightly be named after Fedot Alekseevich Popov, the true leader of that remarkable expedition in which the Cossack Semyon Dezhnev played, although an important, but still a secondary role). We are no longer talking about the names of Barents and Bering, Nansen and Amundsen, Urvantsev and Ushakov - representatives of the tribe of discoverers from the clan of polar heroes. Capes, islands, archipelagos, bays, straits, mountain ranges and entire seas bear their names.

But there are other names. They can be found only on the most detailed, large-scale, as experts say, maps. To the vast majority of us, these names mean nothing or almost nothing. We are just smart enough to figure out: there was once a certain name who discovered something or died near the toe, which later received his name. Sometimes we don’t even know when this person lived, we don’t know if he’s alive now. But in the yet unwritten thousand-volume history of the Arctic, these people should rightfully occupy nine hundred and ninety-nine volumes...

There is an archipelago in the polar ocean New Earth. Two large islands, Northern and Southern, with the Matochkin Shar Strait in the middle. To the left, from the west, is the Barents Sea, to the right, the Kara Sea. Novaya Zemlya stretches in a huge, almost thousand-kilometer arc. At its northernmost tip is the well-known Cape Zhelaniya, and on the western shore, a little short of this cape, a wide, ragged bay juts into the land.

In the seventies of the last century, the Norwegian industrialist-hunter Mak sailed past it and saw Russian crosses worn out by time and fallen by the wind on the shore. These were the graves of Pomors, who from time immemorial had come here to fish for sea animals. They beat seals and walruses, often died from hunger and scurvy and remained forever lying in the frozen rocky ground. In memory of them, Mack named the beautiful and sad bay Russian Harbor.

Majestic blue glaciers descend from the Novaya Zemlya ridges to the very shore of the Barents Sea. They cover the entire central part of the North Island with a solid shell of ice, filling the narrow fiord valleys between mountain ranges, break off into the sea like bizarre and treacherous icebergs. In the place where one of the most formidable glaciers, the Shokalsky glacier, separates from the ice sheet, there is a steep, not very high, but very noticeable mountain with a jagged ridge. Its peak is only two hundred and fifty-three meters away, but it dominates both the glacier and the bay itself. This mountain can be found only on a few, the most meticulously compiled maps. That's where it gets its name: Mount Ermolaeva.

Teacher and pupil

It was July 1956, and streams were rushing along the Shokalsky glacier. They bit deeply into the thickness of the ice, “eating” the sagging, darkened snow before our eyes, went into the depths and somewhere there, in the belly of the glacier, merged into invisible rumbling streams. Walking on the glacier was difficult and unsafe, but the beginning of the International Geophysical Year was approaching, and Russian Harbor, together with the adjacent edge of the ice sheet, had already taken a strong place in all reference books. Several months will pass, and a large expedition of glaciologists will arrive here from Moscow. In the meantime, we need to scout out the approaches to the glacier and the Shokalsky glacier itself.

And then one day, in the center of the ice field, broken by a network of cracks, some strange objects alien to the eye appeared. Half-rotted boards and pieces of tarpaulin, an iron gasoline barrel rusted to holes, scraps of black cloth, torn bags with some kind of yellow powder, broken dog sleds. These were traces of the expedition that worked here in 1932-1933. We knew something about her, but only something. For example, they knew its composition, but not the complete one. They knew that the expedition was headed by geologist Mikhail Mikhailovich Ermolaev. In numerous articles on Arctic topics published in the thirties, this name appeared quite often, but we did not know whether the author was alive or what his fate was.

We decided to write at random, to the address of the Leningrad Arctic Institute. The answer came unexpectedly quickly: “Dear friends! Thank you for remembering. True, you wrote to the institute where I have not worked for eighteen years..."

We met later, after the geophysical year ended (and it lasted not a year, but two!). Our meetings took place both in Moscow and Leningrad - hometown Mikhail Mikhailovich. He willingly talked about his expeditions, but studiously avoided the topic: “Let's publish all this...” For many years he did not agree to make his stories public. But in the end, the highest justice triumphed, and Mikhail Mikhailovich agreed to fill several “gaps in fate.” In yours and your teacher's.

There is a unique institution in Leningrad - the Order of Lenin Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI). This is what it is called today, and it began sixty years ago with the Northern Scientific and Fishing Expedition. February 1920. Arkhangelsk is still in the hands of the interventionists, and the Special Commission of the Northern Front is already thinking about creating a special body that would coordinate all research into the seas of the Arctic Ocean and adjacent territories.

A phrase appears in the journal of the commission’s meeting, the depth and comprehensiveness of which amaze the imagination even today: “Taking into account the vast territory occupied by our Far North, which, due to its natural and historical conditions, does not fit into certain administrative boundaries, its physical and geographical features and the peculiar structure of the economic life, its extreme unpopulation, insufficiency of cultural and technical forces, homogeneity and close connection of interests of the entire vast polar coast, washed along the entire length of the Arctic Ocean, the international importance of the region, taking into account the enormous importance of northern fisheries as an inexhaustible source of food for the entire country, as well as wealth edge of furs and other raw materials that should play a significant role in the future of Russian trade, the Meeting considers it necessary to have a non-departmental body in charge of all issues of scientific and commercial research of the Northern Territory.”

The Revolutionary Military Council of the 6th Army addresses the corresponding proposal directly to V.I. Lenin. Just nine days after the liberation of Arkhangelsk, on March 4, 1920, the Northern Scientific and Fishery Expedition was created under the Supreme Council of National Economy.

The scientific council of the expedition included a whole constellation of academicians and professors: A. P. Karpinsky (then president of the Academy of Sciences), Yu. M. Shokalsky, A. E. Fersman, L. S. Berg, N. M. Knipovich, K. M. Deryugin. And the Northern Expedition, which soon grew into the Institute for the Study of the North, was led by Rudolf Lazarevich Samoilovich, a former underground revolutionary who became an outstanding polar explorer, expert and researcher of the Soviet Arctic.

Rudolf Lazarevich Samoilovich was a mining engineer by training, and a revolutionary and researcher by vocation. While in exile in Arkhangelsk, he became closely acquainted with the remarkable Russian polar geologist, who also devoted much effort to the underground struggle against the autocracy, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Rusanov. Both of them, having once become, in Samoilovich’s words, “involuntarily northerners,” became northerners by vocation for the rest of their lives.

In 1912, Rusanov went on the ship “Hercules” to Spitsbergen, an archipelago that did not belong to anyone at that time, to explore coal deposits there. Along with him and next to him was mining engineer Samoilovich. In one of the letters, the head of the expedition spoke about his young colleague in the following way: “Rudolf Lazarevich Samoilovich was invited as a mining engineer... Samoilovich and I have collected comprehensive material about modern industry throughout Spitsbergen... I must mention the courage of my companion Samoilovich. In general, Samoilovich turned out to be a very useful member of the expedition, and I presented him with the most valuable and very extensive collections collected by me and him.”

After successful exploration in Spitsbergen, which led to the discovery of a number of coal deposits, Rusanov went into the ice, into the unknown, on the Hercules, and died along with the ship and ten of his companions. And Samoilovich returned from Spitsbergen to his homeland and continued the work he had started. In 1913-1915, he regularly visited the distant archipelago, discovering more and more new coal seams, and at the same time tirelessly promoting in the press the importance and necessity for Russia of the practical development of Arctic Spitsbergen. He writes passionately that our country should not depend on foreign coal supplies, especially now that the first World War. Samoilovich ended his call with prophetic words: “We must hope that after the war many things will awaken and stir, and now there are real reasons to assume that truly national significance Spitsbergen will be fully appreciated."

While studying Spitsbergen, setting up claim pillars there and organizing coal mining for Russia, Samoilovich continued to advocate for the search for Rusanov’s missing expedition. Even after in March 1915, the Council of Ministers of Russia decided to consider the expedition lost and stop the search, Samoilovich courageously appeared in the newspaper with the article “Is Rusanov alive and where to look for him?” Already in Soviet time Rudolf Lazarevich always and everywhere - on Novaya Zemlya, Franz Josef Land, Spitsbergen, Solitude Island and other islands of the Kara Sea - looked for traces of the dead (our polar hydrographs discovered these traces in 1934 on one of the islands off the coast of Taimyr).

Just before the revolution, Samoilovich, who was forbidden by the authorities to live in Central Russia as politically unreliable, worked in North Karelia. Here, in the Olonets province, he discovered a powerful vein of mica-muscovite - even then the rapidly growing electrical industry was in dire need of it. It received its own name: “Samoilovich’s vein,” and this rich deposit dried up relatively recently. A few years later, in 1926, Samoilovich, together with the future academician Dmitry Ivanovich Shcherbakov, carried out the first industrial calculations of the reserves of the “fertility stone” - Khibiny apatite. This work largely predetermined further development geological exploration on the Kola Peninsula and development of its mineral wealth.

Having headed the Northern Scientific and Fishing Expedition, and then the Institute for the Study of the North that grew out of it (later the All-Union Arctic Institute, of which he was director until 1938), Professor Samoilovich coordinated the work of hundreds of researchers in the Far North. Apatity Khibiny, Ukhta oil, Vorkuta coal, Vaigach lead and zinc, deposits of fluorite, copper, molybdenum, nickel, gypsum, asbestos, rock crystal, creation of a canning industry on Murman, development of fur and fisheries, commercial reindeer husbandry, study of the waters of the Arctic Ocean, their hydrological regime and biological wealth - this is what the Northern Scientific and Fishery Expedition was, to a first approximation. And Samoilovich himself concentrated almost all of his expeditionary activities as a geologist and geographer in the twenties on one single object - Novaya Zemlya. He conducted five expeditions to this archipelago, the same number as Rusanov did in his time. The systematic study of Novaya Zemlya, wrote Samoilovich, “gives us not only scientific results, but also increasingly secures this remote outskirts economically for the USSR.” He extremely accurately called Novaya Zemlya the “Gibraltar of the Arctic,” as if guarding the entrance from the relatively accessible Barents Sea to the icy Kara Sea. Largely thanks to Samoilovich, as before to Rusanov, the distant but “our” Novaya Zemlya forever remained Russian, Soviet. In exactly the same way as a result of the efforts of Rusanov and Samoilovich, Soviet coal mines still live and operate in Norwegian Spitsbergen, and our own polar coal comes from there to our northern ports.

A faithful follower and continuer of Rusanov’s Arctic undertakings, the head of the Soviet Novaya Zemlya expeditions sought to conduct them “in the image and likeness” of Rusanov’s, but, of course, not copying, but improving them. Motor-sailing schooners, ordinary Pomeranian longboats, ordinary rowing boats - these are the types of boats that Samoilovich’s expedition used to go to Novaya Zemlya. The country was just being revived after devastation, the era of icebreakers, aviation and science ships had not yet arrived in the Arctic, but the detachments led by Professor Samoilovich “mourned” all the shores of both the North and South islands of the archipelago, and thousands of researchers walked with route work kilometers of the Novaya Zemlya coast, penetrated into deep mountain-glacial areas, conducting geographical, geological, soil, hydrometeorological, paleontological, and zoobotanical observations.

They worked in the Arctic, and that probably says it all: harsh climate, deprivation, danger, direct risk. And as a result, Samoilovich’s five Novaya Zemlya expeditions provided abundant and extremely valuable material, which - for the edification of some current researchers and publishers! - at the same time, in the late twenties, it was processed, summarized and published with good comments and a mandatory summary in English or German. This was the constant style of the head of the Arctic Institute, Samoilovich.

In 1928, his name gained well-deserved worldwide fame - Professor Samoilovich led the historic voyage of the Soviet icebreaker Krasin to rescue the expedition of General Umberto Nobile on the airship Italia, which had suffered a disaster off the coast of Spitsbergen. To the question why the government entrusted such a complex and responsible task to Rudolf Lazarevich, the now living outstanding polar geologist-discoverer Nikolai Nikolaevich Urvantsev answered very well and briefly: “And who, if not him, could be entrusted with such a task? His Spitsbergen and Novaya Zemlya alone were worth it!”

“Our task is the noblest of all that can fall to the lot of a person. We are going to save the perishing, and bringing a person back to life is unsurpassed, true happiness!” - this is what Samoilovich said to the sailors of the Krasin, and the head of the rescue expedition had such happiness: to save the dying people. He brilliantly carried out the search and rescue of the distressed inhabitants of the “Red Tent”, those operations in which the young Soviet polar aviation spoke loudly for the first time - after all, it was the crew of the pilot B. G. Chukhnovsky who managed to discover two completely exhausted Italians among the ice. Professor Samoilovich spoke and wrote about the enormous role of aviation in future exploration of the Central Arctic and circumpolar space, about the beneficial combination of an airplane and an icebreaker in high-latitude expeditions.

During almost thirty years of work in the Far North, the director of the Arctic Institute visited almost all the seas of the Arctic Ocean, visited almost all the large Arctic archipelagos and islands, and flew in 1931 as the scientific director of a unique international air expedition on the airship "Graf Zeppelin" over the entire Western Arctic, while conducting very interesting observations that have not lost their value to this day.

Like his “godfather” Rusanov, Samoilovich was a visionary explorer, he knew that the Arctic, Northern sea ​​route, the entire Far North awaits a great scientific and economic future. Back in the early thirties, Professor Samoilovich began to work closely on preparing the first Soviet Antarctic expedition, which was destined to take place only a quarter of a century later. In 1934, he organized the Department of Geography of Polar Countries at Leningrad State University and thus began to train the first Soviet professional polar researchers.

In the winter of 1937-1938, during his last, twenty-first, Arctic expedition, Rudolf Lazarevich Samoilovich led, at the unanimous request of authoritative polar captains, the forced wintering in the ice of three icebreaking steamships - “Sadko”, “Sedova” and “Malygina”. Two hundred and seventeen people took part in that difficult and dangerous drift, among whom were women, sick and weakened people, but thanks to the outstanding human and organizational abilities of the head of the expedition, it (as, indeed, all his previous scientific enterprises without exception) passed without a single casualty , without a single major problem. Moreover, the drift of three icebreaking steamships brought rich scientific fruits and serious discoveries in that region of the Arctic where Nansen’s famous Fram had drifted more than forty years earlier.

Fifty-seven-year-old Professor Samoilovich, along with ordinary researchers, carried out various observations during that drift, together with all members of the ship’s crews he took part in emergency operations, carried coal, sawed snow, from which they then melted water, dug in the sides of steamships with a crowbar in his hands - the ice tried to unite, move, crush the ships...

In the spring of 1938, the pilots were evacuated to Mainland one hundred eighty-four people, thirty-three sailors remained on three ships - to wait for navigation and removal from the ice with the help powerful icebreaker. The head of the expedition radioed the leadership of the Main Northern Sea Route: “I consider it my duty to stay on the ships until the end of the drift,” but he was told that the interests of the Arctic Institute require his stay on the mainland, in Leningrad.

According to the mother of Vladimir Rusanov, her son’s favorite words were: “Why not do more if you can?” This was exactly the life motto, the scientific and human credo of Rudolf Lazarevich Samoilovich. He wanted his favorite students to be just as obsessed with science and the Arctic. And among them is his most beloved, Misha Ermolaev, who as a fifteen-year-old boy came to him on the Northern scientific and fishing expedition.

This was in 1920, in the very first months of the Northern Expedition. Misha Ermolaev took the modest position of “technical employee” on the staff. The teenager was interested in electromechanics and soon entered the Polytechnic Institute, but suddenly he developed transient consumption, and the famous doctor Sternberg (brother of an even more famous astronomer) “let him off” for a maximum of one and a half years to live. It was necessary, in the words of Mikhail Mikhailovich himself, “to live these short months meaningfully, and as interestingly as possible.”

In the year of his untimely death, predicted with all sincerity, Ermolaev begged the director of the Institute for the Study of the North, Samoilovich, his first scientific mentor and a person very close to him, to take him on a naval expedition to Novaya Zemlya. So, in the summer of 1925, a twenty-year-old cabin boy appeared on the small motor-sailing schooner “Elding”, he was also a geodesist technician, trainee geologist, laboratory assistant, worker and “a servant for everything”!

"Elding" carried out a detour and a detailed description of the Novaya Zemlya shores. One chilly August day, the schooner dropped anchor in a wide bay on the western coast of Novaya Zemlya. Samoilovich and Ermolaev landed on the shore of the Russian Harbor, but soon bad weather forced them to seek shelter under a small boat with its keel overturned. Huddled close to each other, they dreamed of the warmth and comfort of their not-so-comfortable “Elding,” but at the same time they also dreamed of something else. They loved this beautiful bay with blue glacier, comfortable coves jutting into the shore, scandalous bird colonies on steep rocks and a mountain, not very high, but very noticeable - the nameless peak “253”. Mentally, Professor Samoilovich has already chosen Russian Harbor for future work.

Then came a seven-year break. Ermolaev continued to visit Novaya Zemlya, but to its other bays, to other mountains. As time passed, Dr. Sternberg’s cruel forecast did not come true, consumption, unable to resist the power and charm of the North, retreated and withered away. Ermolaev took up geology with passion, quickly became a serious specialist, made several significant discoveries as a prospecting geologist and, for the sake of order, entered the Faculty of Geology, Soils and Geography of Leningrad University. Formally speaking, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences M. M. Ermolaev continues to remain a student to this day, because no matter how hard he tries, it is impossible to find certificates of his graduation from the university anywhere. I would like to believe, however, that the Higher Attestation Commission, having learned about this, will not deprive Professor Ermolaev of his academic degrees and titles... What can you do! The young scientist did not know how to study! Every spring he ran away from lectures... on polar expeditions, each more significant than the other.

1928 was a special year in the Arctic. This was the year of the flight of the airship "Italy", the year of the triumph of the polar brotherhood, the year of salvation by our sailors and pilots of the Umberto Nobile expedition. Professor Samoilovich was at the head of the rescue operations, but this time Ermolaev was not next to him, although he was most directly related to the events of those days.

Barely scientific world learned about the upcoming flight of the Italian airship, serious fears arose among polar scientists for the fate of Nobile and his companions. The general conceived the air expedition beautifully and boldly, even too boldly: he intended to land a group of researchers on the drifting ice at the North Pole (including the young and talented Swedish geophysicist Finn Malmgren, whose tragic and largely mysterious death is still fifty years more than a few years later, can’t help but worry). Naturally, one had to take into account the likelihood that the airship would not be able to return to the pole and take the “landing party” to the mainland. In this case, people would have to get to the solid shore on their own, and this would make their chances of salvation close to zero...

Soviet polar explorers understood the situation with utmost clarity and therefore acted “proactively.” Even then, in 1928, a geophysical observatory was organized on the New Siberian Islands, headed by one of Georgy Sedov’s satellites, famous traveler and artist N.V. Pinegin. In particular, the winterers were given the task: if necessary, to begin searching from the New Siberian Islands for members of the Nobile expedition, the same expedition that was just preparing for departure. The group of observatory employees also included Mikhail Mikhailovich Ermolaev.

Nobile failed to land people at the Pole. The airship died, the general himself and those of his companions who were lucky enough to survive ended up on drifting ice in the Spitsbergen area, and therefore the winterers of the New Siberian Islands did not have to participate in the rescue of the Italians. This was done by the sailors of the icebreaker “Krasin”, the air crew of the pilot Chukhnovsky, and pilots from other countries. The book by R. L. Samoilovich, “To Save the Nobile Expedition,” which was published in its fourth edition in 1967, tells about that epic. The editor of the book and the author of excellent, artistically written comments was Mikhail Mikhailovich Ermolaev.

Ermolaev spent two years on the New Siberian Islands. To the specialties of geographer, geologist, topographer, permafrost specialist, hydrologist, he added one more - stove maker! And not just an amateur, which a winterer often becomes out of dire necessity, but a certified specialist: before leaving for the Arctic, each observatory employee received seaport purely working qualifications. So Mikhail Mikhailovich received a stove-maker's certificate... Two years later, having made their way through the north of Yakutia, engulfed in a kulak uprising, they returned to the mainland, to Leningrad. And here Samoilovich reminded his young colleague about a wide bay with a blue glacier.

Seven brave

The year 1932 came, and with it the Second International Polar Year. Polar stations were quickly built and put on air throughout the Arctic. One of them was Russian Harbor. It was decided to organize a permanent scientific point there and study the entire ice cover of Novaya Zemlya. But at the same time, it was supposed to solve a problem that was not at all polar, but, so to speak, a general scientific one. And this problem arose quite unexpectedly, as a result of... sabotage.

An enemy hand blew up an arsenal near Moscow. The explosion was so strong that air wave, which reached the city, knocked out glass and even frames in many houses. But when they mapped the points where the explosion was heard, a strange picture emerged: the sound was heard intermittently. At the “epicenter” of the explosion there was a core with a diameter of about one hundred and eighty kilometers, where audibility was direct. Then there was a wide zone in which the explosion was not heard, and behind this “zone of silence” a belt suddenly appeared again, the inhabitants of which clearly heard the explosion, albeit in lower tones. This belt was not too wide; it was replaced by a second zone of silence, and that, in turn, by a new zone of audibility.

So around the core of the explosion there were concentric rings of audibility and inaudibility zones. But that’s not all: when the speed of sound was calculated, it turned out that within the core it, as expected, was about three hundred meters per second, decreased in the first hearing zone, and became very small in the second. Thus, the result was a completely absurd phenomenon: sound in the atmosphere travels intermittently and at different speeds!

Geophysicists began to search for an explanation for this apparent paradox. Scientists quickly agreed that somewhere in the mysterious, then unknown stratosphere, at an altitude of twenty to thirty kilometers, there was a layer of warm air that, like a screen, reflected sound waves. Bumping into the screen, the waves go back to the Earth in huge arches and arcs and form alternately wide zones of audibility and inaudibility. Then it becomes clear why the sound of the explosion spread at different speeds: the sound rays have a different path, closer to the core of the explosion it is straight, and in arcs, naturally, it is curved and elongated.

Everything seemed to be falling into place, but quite legitimately another question arose: does a warm screen always exist, does it not disappear at night when the work of the Sun stops? Does it cover large areas or is it located in isolated areas of the stratosphere? The hypothesis of a “hot” stratosphere could be tested in a relatively simple and ingenious way - to “get rid” of the Sun, to conduct an experiment in high latitudes, where night reigns for several months a year. Simultaneously, conduct similar experiments in mid-latitudes to cover a significant area of ​​the atmosphere.

Leading meteorologists did not hide their skepticism regarding the upcoming research. Professor Gergesel from Berlin, head of the International Aerological Commission, was confident that the heating of the stratosphere layer was solely caused by the Sun, and therefore it was useless to send expensive expeditions to the polar countries. However, young geophysicists, devoid of the bias often characteristic of major authorities, insisted that such experiments be carried out. One of the expeditions of this kind was the Ermolaev group, and the place assigned to it was Russian Harbor Bay, the seventy-sixth parallel.

To begin with, Ermolaev was invited to an internship in Germany, in Göttingen, at the observatory of the famous geophysicist Wichert. But the interests of the preparing expedition urgently required the presence of its leader in Leningrad, and Ermolaev was forced to refuse a tempting foreign business trip. To compensate, a scientist who did not need an internship came from Germany, Dr. Kurt Welken.

He was the same age as Ermolaev: twenty-seven. Welken's track record already included participation in the then-large Greenland expedition of Alfred Wegener (this name is often remembered these days in connection with the hypothesis of continental drift, but, so to speak, from a universal human point of view, the work that Wegener did in Greenland, where he died trying to help his comrades). Dr. Kurt Welken, a two-meter blue-eyed and red-bearded giant, was a versatile personality. A geophysicist and glaciologist, he was also, as it were, the permanent champion of the German Duchy of Hanover in... continuous dancing! According to Mikhail Mikhailovich Ermolaev, “the expedition was quite happy with the candidacy of this learned dancer.”

In July 1932 they went to Russian Harbor.

The film “Seven Braves” was released in the thirties. A largely naive but truthful film about the Arctic and its people. It is unlikely that any of the spectators paid attention to the name of one of the consultants of that film, directed by S. Gerasimov. This consultant is M. Ermolaev. It is not surprising, therefore, that the film contains many events taken from the life of the expedition in Russian Harbor. Even a popular song is supposedly about Russian Harbor, just replace one word in it:

We fought bravely more than once,
Accepting your challenge,
And they returned victoriously
To a quiet haven, home!

Seven people lived and worked on the shore of a wide bay: M. M. Ermolaev, K. Velken, associate professor of Leningrad University meteorologist M. N. Karbasnikov, botanist A. I. Zubkov, driver mechanic V. E. Petersen, carpenter Sakharov and musher Yasha Ardeev. Many years later, one old polar surveyor, who worked for some time in Russian Harbor, said: “Mikhail Mikhailovich Ermolaev was very reminiscent of V.K. Arsenyev - he was a traveler of the same breed. And the role of Dersu Uzala was played by the Nenets Yasha Ardeev. He was listed as a musher among them, but he also went hunting - he got food for the same dogs - and took part in long hikes, and served as a translator when they ended up in Nenets camps. He was an inquisitive guy, he always strived to master German in addition to Nenets! So I followed Kurt around, listening to him talk to Mikhail Mikhailovich. But he learned, in my opinion, one single word and famously demonstrated his learning three times a day, before eating for the whole winter he shouted: “Akhtung!”

They worked on a broad scientific program: meteorology, botany, zoology, geology, and, of course, atmospheric physics. On the Shokalsky glacier, ten kilometers from the coast, they set up a tent and began conducting a series of explosions here, sending elastic waves into the atmosphere.

Experiments were carried out throughout the Arctic. One of the points was Hooker Island on Franz Josef Land. That wintering was led by Ivan Dmitrievich Papanin, and the explosions were carried out by the German astronomer Dr. Joachim Scholz. Most northern point became Rudolf Island on Franz Josef Land. Explosions were heard both at Cape Zhelaniya and at the Matochkin Shar polar station. The entire network of scientific stations spread over a space of nearly one thousand two hundred kilometers, but Russian Harbor became the true capital of these works.

On a flat area in the middle of the glacier, a column of cans of ammonal was installed, with a total weight of half a ton to a ton. A detonator was placed in each can, and the wires went to an explosive machine. The person who did the detonation - usually Ermolaev himself - was hiding with a machine in a shelter carved out of the ice, about four hundred meters from the explosion site. The time was checked using a chronometer—the registration of the explosion began synchronously at all observation points.

The first scientific explosion sounded on December 16, 1932 and immediately made a stunning impression on the entire scientific world: two Novaya Zemlya waves, or rather two arches of one sound, were recorded on Hooker Island, and two arches of the Hooker sound were recorded in Russian Harbor! A similar picture was noted at Cape Zhelaniya, and at Matochkin Shar, and at Dikson. This means that even in polar night conditions there is a layer of “hot” stratosphere above the Arctic.

In total, twenty-eight explosions were carried out in Russian Harbor (twelve in winter, eleven in summer and five in the intermediate seasons), and each time scientists were convinced of the validity of the hypothesis about a warm layer in the stratosphere. Now the skeptics had to openly admit that they were wrong - atmospheric physicists and aerologists around the world became interested in polar experiments, and the time had come for the most important, global explosion.

The Treaty of Versailles ordered Germany to destroy a number of arsenals. One of them is in the town of Olenduk, on the border with Holland. So we decided to combine business with pleasure - to use the “echo of war” for purely scientific purposes. The gigantic explosion was supposed to sound simultaneously with the explosions at the Arctic stations, and a network of sensitive devices stretching from Milan in the south to Franz Josef Land in the north was called upon to register it.

This super-explosion brought a result that no longer seemed unexpected: the warm layer in the stratosphere covers not only the Arctic, but also moderate latitudes and is located at an altitude of twenty to thirty kilometers. Indirect calculations showed that while the air temperature in Russian Harbor reached forty degrees below zero, at a twenty-kilometer altitude it rose to thirty-five degrees above zero. This was the first time the high stratosphere was probed on a large scale. The path to its knowledge, to the surprise of many, ran through the Arctic.

However, the main object of scientific activity of scientists, their main magnet and their main love was the Novaya Zemlya glaciation. The Novaya Zemlya ice sheet stretches for more than four hundred kilometers along the entire Northern Island. At the parallel to the Russian Harbor, its width reaches seventy kilometers, and only the narrow coastal edges in the west and east of the island, as well as in the far north, near Cape Zhelaniya, are free from ice.

Ermolaev’s group carried out observations in a variety of areas of the ice sheet. In twos and threes they climbed to the most remote places from the Russian Harbor, crossed the entire North Island across, from the Barents Sea to the Kara Sea, they set up a tent for occasional observations in the center of the shield, on the ice divide, at an altitude of eight hundred meters above sea level, and wherever they were, they drilled into the ice, stuck wooden slats into it, and monitored its growth and melting icy surface. They observed the formation of icebergs in the bay, mapped temporary streams and entire rivers seething on the glacier at the height of the summer melt, and measured the speed of ice movement. But it fluctuated sharply: in the center of the island, on high and relatively flat areas, it was very small, increasing noticeably on long and narrow glaciers, such as the Shokalsky glacier. Here it exceeded one hundred meters per year, and in places with a sharp difference in height, on the so-called icefalls, the speed of the ice flow reached three hundred meters per year. There was a case when a sudden violent movement of ice led to the instantaneous formation of a crack into which a barrel of fuel collapsed.

Ermolaev chose, perhaps, the most beautiful and inaccessible natural ice “structure” as the main place for observing glaciers - a multi-stage amphitheater, seventy meters above the surface of the shield. Barrier of Doubt - that’s what the members of Ermolaev’s expedition called this formidable icefall: they doubted whether they would be able to climb to its top. However, they got up, set up housing here and again started doing explosions - only this time explosions of a different kind, seismic: in this way they determined the thickness of the glacier. This was led by Dr. Kurt Welken, who had solid Greenland experience in seismic exploration, and the results turned out to be impressive: the thickness of the Novaya Zemlya glaciers was approximately half a kilometer.

This is how the first Soviet polar glaciologists, young enthusiasts of one of the most exciting sciences - the science of the Earth's ice - worked on the glaciers of Novaya Zemlya. For long trips on glaciers, the expedition had excellent vehicle- snowmobiles. They were designed and manufactured at NAGI according to the design of A. N. Tupolev. They even had their own “branded” name - Tu-5. Lightweight duralumin body, duralumin skis, three-cylinder engine with a power of about one hundred horsepower.

These fast, maneuverable sleds (the total weight of the sled with the engine did not exceed four hundred kilograms) were usually ridden by three people: Ermolaev, driver Petersen (“a great guy, we spent the winter with him with great pleasure”) and someone else, most often Welken. Slowly, with caution so as not to injure their skis on sharp stones, they climbed along the moraine hills to the mountain, which by this time had already received the name Ermolaev. At its foot, the snowmobile smoothly crossed onto the Shokalsky glacier and headed for the Barrier of Doubt. A chaos of bottomless cracks began, five, ten, and twenty meters wide. Blue sapphire ice fractures fell into a black abyss that seemed to have no bottom. Is it not about these faults, or about the New Earth, that the lines were written:

And eternal snow and blue as a bowl
Sapphire, a treasury of ice!
The land is terrible, just like ours,
But never giving birth.

During the expedition, perhaps the only way to overcome the cracks was spontaneously developed. They marked the direction along which the strongest snow bridges were located, thrown over cracks by prolonged winter snowstorms, took the sleds to a smooth surface, accelerated them to a speed of one hundred and twenty kilometers per hour and jumped over several such gorges at once in one fell swoop. This took only a few seconds, and then the snowmobiles again found themselves on relatively flat ice, and behind them for a long time columns of snow dust and tiny ice chips from the “strong” bridges that had collapsed remained in the air. The method, needless to say, is extremely risky (what if the engine stalls?!), but, fortunately, it has never failed the scientific reckless people against their will.

Exactly twenty-five years later, in July 1957, the sleigh-and-tractor train of our glaciological expedition slowly crawled along the Shokalsky glacier. The powerful S-80 tractor, with a grinding sound, dragged behind it a wide sleigh on heavy metal skids with a beam house installed on them. People walked along the sides - the train was now moving across the Barrier of Doubt, along a narrow ice bridge between two dizzying cracks. Both the tractor and the sleigh barely fit on the strip blue ice. The tractor cabin doors were wide open so that Kolya Neverov, our experienced and brave driver, could leave the car in a moment of danger. Before and even after, the tractor had more than once fallen into cracks masked by snow, but for some reason the same miracle that, they say, happens once every three years, invariably came to the rescue. And so, when the train reached a pink high plateau, someone saw a black flag lying on the ice on a broken, time-eaten pole - it was one of the seven hundred flags given to Ermolaev by members of Wegener’s expedition. With such flags, glaciologists mark their path along the glacier, avoiding dangerous cracks and icefalls. This means that Ermolaev passed here a quarter of a century before us.

Yes, we followed the beaten path both literally and figuratively. Moreover, there were many of us, and we walked solidly, a whole train, or even two, with a good-quality home on a sleigh, like snails with their own house. We had a radio station, although it was capricious, he was traveling with us large stock food - in a word, we were fully armed with the scientific and everyday equipment of the mid-20th century and the era of the International Geophysical Year. There were two of them, at most three, and everything was a wonder to them: the Novaya Zemlya nature, the ice under their feet, and the terrible cracks right under the runners of the snowmobiles. And we could already use the results of their observations; we found in their articles warnings and advice, as well as good, albeit meager, descriptions of the nature of this ice country, as insidious as it is beautiful.

So, Ermolaev’s expedition studied the Novaya Zemlya glaciers, blew up centners of ammonal, mined unaffordable collections of minerals and rocks, dried herbariums with outlandish polar flora, mapped the shores and nameless mountain ranges, kept a meteorological chronicle of the region, and meanwhile a big disaster was creeping up on Novaya Zemlya : famine began among industrialists, Russians and Nenets.

“There is such a planet...”

Industrialists lived with their families on the coasts of both islands of Novaya Zemlya. They hunted sea animals, caught char in lakes and rivers, set traps for arctic foxes, killed migratory birds and polar bears (not yet protected at that time). Every summer supply ships approached their camps, trading posts, and lonely hunting huts. They took furs and skins, game and fish, and in return brought food and hunting supplies from Arkhangelsk.

In the summer of 1932, access to the North Island coast was particularly difficult: solid ice, descending into the Barents Sea from the north, blocked the way for ships. Realizing that help will come at best, a year later, in the summer of 1933, the inhabitants of Novaya Zemlya began to stretch out their food supplies. Unfortunately, that year the seal hunt sharply deteriorated - the ice closed over the creeks in which the sea animals like to frolic. Lemmings (polar tundra mice, the main food of the arctic fox) disappeared, and accordingly the migration of the arctic fox (generally inedible...) stopped. Soon there was nothing left to eat.

On the entire Northern Island of Novaya Zemlya, only the Ermolaev seven had a reliable supply of food. The ration intended for seven had to be divided in some incomprehensible way among dozens of starving people. In addition, the suddenly expanded “expeditionary team” was scattered over a space of up to two hundred and fifty kilometers. There was no way to count on help from aviation, which at that time was small in number and underpowered. The only hope was expeditionary snowmobiles.

Ermolaev, Petersen and Ardeev began to systematically go around the wintering camps of industrialists, delivering life-saving products to people. The expedition tore away everything it could from itself. They also encouraged the starving people, telling them that on the mainland they knew about the sorrows of Novaya Zemlya, that they were already preparing an icebreaker trip there.

An old industrialist was dying in one of the camps. He listened to Ermolaev, was silent for a long time, and then shook his head: “Oh, son, what an icebreaker there is!” You probably heard that there is a planet called Mars? Well, they still can’t even get to her, but you’re talking about coming to us, to Novaya Zemlya! No, no, you can’t get here anyway...

And yet the icebreaker voyage was being prepared. In Murmansk, the famous icebreaker Krasin was hastily equipped for an unprecedented voyage. The history of the Arctic has never known anything like this: never has any navigator ventured into the high-latitude polar ice in winter. Even in summer, ships were not always able to overcome the ice of the Barents Sea; what will happen now, in the midst of winter, when the ice fields merge and weld together? Only through narrow and unstable gaps between the ice was it possible to navigate a heavy icebreaker, but in those days ice aerial reconnaissance was taking its very first steps. How to do without it?

Now everything depended on the smooth operation of the Novaya Zemlya stations “Cape Zhelaniya” and “Russkaya Gavan”. "Krasin" needed information about the weather, the state of sea ice near west coast Novaya Zemlya, and these reports had to arrive on board the ship uninterruptedly. At this very moment, a powerful transmitter at Cape Zhelaniya failed. The icebreaker's flight was in danger of being disrupted.

In Russian Harbor they learned about what had happened on the same day: this was reported on a weak emergency radio by shocked “desires” who plaintively asked whether there were suitable radio tubes in Russian Harbor to replace the burned ones. Fortunately, there were such lamps in Russian Harbor, but how to deliver them to their destination? Ride dogs or snowmobiles north along the western coast of the island, along an unreliable floating ice, near the front of gigantic glaciers, where heavy icebergs were constantly collapsing, it was impossible. There was only one thing left: to move along the ice sheet along its central, axial part.

This was the only real and, moreover, the shortest route - two hundred odd kilometers. All previous trips on the glacier on snowmobiles ended successfully. Why not count on success now? True, the route was longer than all the previous ones and ran through places where the expedition members had never been before. Well, so much the better! Along the way, they will collect information about the nature of the northern part of the Novaya Zemlya ice sheet. One way or another, there is no choice. We need to hurry to Cape Zhelaniya: the Krasin is supposed to set sail in March, and now it’s already February 23, 1933. We need to hurry. Let science, which they serve faithfully, now serve people, help them in difficult times, save those dying from hunger...

Ermolaev, Velken and Petersen gathered instantly. They took an emergency supply of food and a six-fold supply of fuel. We packed simple personal backpacks and simple equipment. They wrapped the precious radio tubes in soft bundles. And we set off.

They expected to overcome it in one day.

In the land of white spots

It was a fierce Arctic February. Only in the afternoon hours did the dawn turn pink on the southern horizon: the sun had already risen after almost four months of polar night, but constant snowstorms and a foggy haze hanging over the glacier hid it from view. The snowmobiles moved at low speed and with great shaking - winter hurricanes had compacted the snow, cut it, and divided it into solid waves with pointed crests. Along this “highway”, it was necessary to spend over three hours instead of the usual thirty to forty minutes on the road to the top of the shield, to the ice divide, which lies at an equal distance from the Barents and Kara Seas. The overworked engine overheated, and every now and then it required a break, coolness - and this in thirty-degree frost! But they still reached the ice divide and headed northeast, to Cape Zhelaniya. Now they have entered the boundaries of a genuine “terra incognita”, which has never been visited by man. They entered the land of white spots.

White spots on the map. It is generally accepted that they have been erased, that there are no more undiscovered lands, unknown mountains and rivers, islands and bays. Yes, most likely, major geographical discoveries will no longer follow, although there is still some chance in the Arctic and Antarctic (not to mention the World Ocean). However, there are white spots on the map, white in the literal sense of the word, and no one is going to erase them: white represents the Earth’s glaciers on the map.

Fresh continental ice cover about eleven percent of all land, occupying an area of ​​over sixteen million square kilometers, and their volume reaches thirty million cubic kilometers. It is possible, perhaps, not to provide here widely known information about what will happen if all the glaciers of the planet are melted; or what the thickness of the ice sheet would be if it were evenly distributed over the globe. The given figures are quite enough to realize the enormity and significance of the current glaciation of the Earth.

The glaciers of Novaya Zemlya occupy a rather modest place in the “table of ranks”. Their total area a little more than twenty-four thousand square kilometers, and a volume of about seven thousand cubic kilometers. They are far from the glaciers of Spitsbergen, not to mention Greenland or Antarctica, the largest moisture accumulators on the globe. But the processes taking place on the glaciers of Novaya Zemlya are fundamentally no different from those characteristic of the giant Antarctica. Therefore, they are no less interesting than the giant glaciers. Moreover, the ice sheet of Novaya Zemlya is like Antarctica in miniature, a natural model of a huge cover, which can be used to study not only current, but also past glaciations in the history of the planet.

How does a glacier live? What does he eat? What does he strive for - an active life or degradation, slow extinction? Will the Arctic covers merge into a single shell that will cover Europe and Asia, as it did several tens of thousands of years ago, or are today’s polar ice just witnesses of the past, a relic of a different climatic era, a relic doomed to destruction? All these questions are extremely pressing even today, when scientists from almost all countries of the world have been conducting long-term research in almost all icy regions of the globe. It is not difficult to guess with what passion Ermolaev’s expedition studied its “blank spot”.

Ermolaev and Velken greedily sketched out the appearance of the snow-ice relief in field diaries, hastily, literally on the move, stuck a rod into the snow, measured its thickness and density, in order to then calculate the water supply of seasonal snow and its contribution to the accumulation of ice. After all, white snow is, so to speak, the black bread of glaciation. Soft snowflakes-stars, deposited on the surface of the glacier, turn over time into firn - dense granular snow. In a cold polar climate, the snow on the glacier does not have time to melt in one summer, overwinters, and only partially melts again the following summer. Melt water from the surface seeps deep into the firn, fills the pores, freezes in them, and after two or three seasons the firn turns into real ice, becoming a “legitimate” part of the glacier itself.

When the snowmobile moved along the central axis of the ice sheet to the northeast, the researchers were suddenly presented with an amazing picture: almost the entire sheet was bare, devoid of snow. Or rather, there was snow, but it lay in a thin layer and mostly in the lowlands. And under this layer, instead of a multimeter thick firn, as is the case on all other glaciers, glacier ice lay directly. This means that on the surface lay only the snow of this winter, the so-called snow of this year. This means that in the coming summer it will melt, which means that it will not “feed” the ice sheet, deprive it of much-needed nutrition, and the shield will wither away from year to year until it disappears completely.

Ermolaev and Velken quickly found the cause of this strange situation - the wind! The strongest winds in the Arctic do not allow glaciers to live. They tear off the newly deposited snow, do not allow it to accumulate in significant quantities, and the glacier is forced to exist at the expense of old resources. Therefore, the Novaya Zemlya ice sheet is doomed: a remnant of a former, more favorable climatic era, it is rapidly approaching its end.

(A quarter of a century has passed, and it turned out that everything is much more complicated. Yes, the shield of the New Earth is dying, but very slowly, “with interruptions.” It does not sit on a starvation ration at all, but still receives food. In years when there is a stormy summer melting - and in the early thirties, during the warming of the Arctic, this is exactly what happened - meltwater penetrates deeply into the firn layer, quickly fills the pores, freezes in them, and all the firn, accumulated over several seasons, turns into ice. Glaciologists say that in this case the glacier is fed according to the summer type - there is no increase in winter snow, it is partially swept away by the winds, as Ermolaev and Welken assumed.

Our expedition of 1957-1959 everywhere observed many meters of snow and firn on the glaciers of Novaya Zemlya, and this gave us reason to accuse our predecessors of a gross mistake. But they were not mistaken—it was nature that was “mistaken.” It is she who, with her whims, violates seemingly clear and irrefutable ideas and forces us to reconsider hypotheses. As soon as the Arctic climate became more severe and melting decreased, the feeding regime of the ice sheet quickly changed. It became wintry, snowy, the thickness of firn in the central, most high areas the shield reached twelve to fifteen meters. But the conditions of precipitation changed, melting increased, summer rains became more frequent - and everything returned “to normal”; by the end of the fifties, a turn to the summer nutrition of the thirties began.)

The snowmobiles were heading northeast. Suddenly, a rocky ridge appeared right ahead, appearing literally before our eyes: it was melting from under the ice. It was small, but still geographical discovery, and christenings immediately followed - as a sign of gratitude to the institution that supplied the expedition with wonderful snowmobiles, the ridge was named “TsAGI Mountains.” However, after this, the wonderful sleigh jumped out onto an uneven, lumpy snow-stone field, twitched, scraped its runners and steel.

The travelers decided to take advantage of the unplanned stop and top up the fuel tanks - the difficult road, as expected, required increased power supply to the engine. But when they wanted to go further, it turned out that the runners, heated from fast driving, hot from friction, were firmly soldered into the snow.

Long hours of monotonous, exhausting work dragged on: we had to completely unload the sled, poke out, release the runners from captivity, and clear them of stuck clods. When Petersen started the engine again, they suddenly saw a shaggy wall of snowstorm approaching from the east. The Novaya Zemlya forest fell on them.

“So the song about the wind begins...”

“Then a stormy, very excited Cyclone burst in, wrapping his cloak tightly around himself. His eyes shot arrows of lightning. He drove in front of him, lashing with a whip, a giant top, a buzzing top made of water and sand... Wrapped in furs, red-nosed, with a long white flowing beard, Nord-Ost invaded... Slanted, with a pirate earring in his ear, puffing out his dark cheeks , breathing with a whistle through his rare teeth, cutting the air with a samurai sword, Typhoon burst in. Behind him, ringing the spurs on his moccasins, in a wide sombrero cowboy hat, frantically twirling a whistling lasso over his head, Tornado rushed... The half-naked Fen rushed, a burning brunette with fiery eyes and a thin, dry mouth...”

This is how L. Cassil described the “congress of the winds” at the court of King Fanfaron in “My Dear Boys.” In the poetic (and quite consistent from a scientific point of view) picture, there was a place for Typhoon, and for Sirocco, and for Samum... But Bora was unlucky! Perhaps because she is often called Nord-Ost, and in this capacity she will probably already be a delegate to the above-mentioned congress.

In 1969, a book entitled “Hurricanes, Storms and Tornadoes” was published. Its author is the famous geologist academician Dmitry Vasilyevich Nalivkin. Already on the threshold of his eightieth birthday, he began to write this, I am not afraid to say, an outstanding work of science and art. There are no ordinary winds in this book, there are only villains in it: air “whirlpools” - vortices, devilish atmospheric towers hundreds of kilometers in diameter and up to fifteen kilometers in height, typhoons, tornadoes, rotating at a fantastic speed, sometimes exceeding the speed of sound - one thousand two hundred kilometers at one o'clock. And finally, storms - black, snow, sand, squalls, sirocco, simoom, Afghan, bora - up to thirty varieties of storms, terrible, drying, devastating... Among the numerous information about hurricanes, storms and tornadoes, the data on their energy. It turns out that the energy of an ordinary summer thunderstorm is equivalent to the energy of thirteen atomic bombs, and an “average” hurricane is equivalent to five hundred thousand such bombs. This is when you clearly begin to understand the power of Nature, its calm superiority over the thoughts of man...

The word "bora" goes back to boreas - the north wind of Greek mythology. On the coast of the Black and Adriatic seas Bora comes from the north, from the north, north-east. Unfortunately, she is well known in our Novorossiysk. On that Southern City it collapses, falling from the Markhot Pass. The Novorossiysk bora attacks people, houses standing in the ship's bay, and many heartbreaking stories (quite true in their essence) have been written about the southern bora coming from the north.

But this southern woman has a close relative on Novaya Zemlya. The Arctic sister is just as insidious, capricious, and cruel. However, to all these far from best qualities, two more are added: the Novaya Zemlya bora is much more severe (after all, it operates in high icy latitudes) and, most importantly, it exhibits the greatest activity under the cover of impenetrable polar darkness, at the height of the months-long northern night.

Back in 1925, our outstanding polar explorer Vladimir Yulievich Wiese made a theoretical development of the problem of the Novaya Zemlya bora. It is amazing with what correctness and accuracy he gave its meteorological characteristics in those years when he had almost no direct observational data at his disposal. Wiese showed that bora is by no means a local wind. It is caused by the general circulation of the atmosphere over a vast area. For its formation, it is necessary that an anticyclone (an area of ​​high pressure) form over the Kara Sea, east of Novaya Zemlya, and cyclones should occur over the Barents Sea at this time. In such a situation, “excess” air begins to move from east to west, from the Kara Sea to the Barents Sea. But here New Earth stands in his way.

Masses of icy, supercooled air over the frozen Kara Sea begin to slowly and heavily climb the Novaya Zemlya ridges (their height reaches a thousand meters). And then, with every second increasing its power and speed, absorbing more and more new masses of cold air above the glaciers, the bora breaks down to the western, Barents Sea coast, to the Russian Harbor. Here the wind acquires special strength, gustyness, and sharpness. It becomes a hurricane, runs amok and goes wild to its fullest, and then quite quickly dies out in the open flat sea, several tens of kilometers from the coast.

In Russian Harbor, bora can happen on any day and month of the year, at any hour of the day. Less common in summer, in July. Most often from November to March. In summer it usually lasts several hours, in winter - at least two to three days in a row. Sometimes this pandemonium lasts six to eight days. There is a known case when the bora lasted ten days without a break. This is probably a record (although, frankly speaking, there is nothing to be proud of...). To summarize, we can say this: there are 8760 hours in a year (non-leap year); of these, for 900 hours (ten percent of the time) bora rages in Russian Harbor.

The wind speed during the Novaya Zemlya bora usually exceeds twenty meters per second. A person can walk quite confidently, leaning slightly forward. Moving against a wind blowing at a speed of twenty-eight to thirty-four meters per second is already quite difficult. Individual impulses can shake you and knock you off your feet. And a particularly unruly bora rushes at a speed of forty meters per second. Here the person becomes almost helpless. You can lie with your chest on the wall of such wind, and it will not let you fall. It takes two or three people to move even short distances, tied with a strong rope. The air temperature drops twenty, thirty and even forty degrees below zero.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Swedish meteorologist Bodman, who spent the winter in Antarctica, developed a formula with an ominous name: “Cruelty of weather.” You can't say more precisely. It is the combination of wind and air temperature that gives the weather cruelty and severity, and the first violin is played by the wind, its strength and speed. When there is calm, for example, the severity of the weather is small, even if the temperature drops almost to the limit, to fifty, sixty degrees below zero. But with a wind of twenty meters per second and a temperature of only ten degrees below zero, the severity of the weather immediately triples. The combination of a wind of forty meters per second and a temperature of minus forty degrees gives tenfold cruelty. Meanwhile, no concessions are made to meteorologists: observations, like football matches, are carried out in any weather. Sometimes the cost of such observations becomes prohibitively high...

And it happens, rarely, not every year, but it happens that the bora is filled with some absolutely fantastic force, and the wind reaches a speed of sixty meters per second. It sucks water out of lakes along with their fish and other fauna, tears off chimneys from houses, and squeezes out windows and doors. Heavy stones fly from the mountains, they break the lighting bulbs of weather vanes at a height of ten to twelve meters above the ground, two-hundred-liter barrels of fuel are rolled by the wind into the frozen sea several kilometers away. Small buildings are collapsing, strong roofs are being cracked, ships anchored in Russian Harbor are being torn off their anchors. Moreover, unlike its southern sister, the Novaya Zemlya bora acts “in tandem” with a blizzard. Thousands (yes, exactly thousands, this is precisely calculated) tons of crushed snow rushing from the ice sheet to the coast, visibility completely disappears - a person cannot even distinguish the fingers of his own outstretched hand. Plus, the blackness of the night. Hopeless, hopeless...

"White sky. White snow. A blizzard girl walks through the gorges!” Not a rosy-cheeked playful girl, but a white killer girl... She swoops in unexpectedly and furiously. Knocks you to the ground. Trampling, rolling. Snow gets clogged under multi-layered clothes, tightly clogs microscopic pores, grows on the face like an impenetrable ice crust, and blocks the respiratory tract. A person can only crawl, but the bora hits him with a tight air cushion, throws him back, and knocks him over backwards. A person first loses his will, and then his strength. The only hope is for a sudden change in the weather, but this almost never happens: the bora usually goes berserk to the end. Yours and your victim. Is it possible to predict the Novaya Zemlya forest? It is possible, but not always, which, of course, depreciates the forecast. Usually, before the bora, the air pressure drops, but very often it increases, and sometimes quite sharply. With good visibility, the forest on the shore of the Russian Harbor Bay can be predicted with great accuracy by the manes of the snowstorm rising above Mount Ermolaev, but how often is there good visibility, especially if you remember the black polar night?!

There are other, more capricious indicators of a nearby hurricane (for example, air humidity), but none of them, nor all of them together, unfortunately, can guarantee an accurate forecast. V. Yu. Wiese thought a lot about this; Ermolaev’s expedition also conducted special experiments during the bora: pilot balloons were launched into the air. With their help, they tried to establish the size of the “hurricane layer”, and in some cases, in the summer, with excellent visibility, this was possible. The balls overcame the elastic layer of air, the rebellious hurricane layer, and at about an altitude of one kilometer abruptly changed their flight direction, ending up in a different air flow. This made it possible to expand knowledge about the Novaya Zemlya forest, but did not greatly advance the quality of the forecast.

Our glaciological expedition of 1957-1959, along with the study of Novaya Zemlya glaciation, paid considerable attention to the problem of bora. We tried to intercept the bora at several points simultaneously: on the seashore, in the center of the ice sheet and between them - on the Barrier of Doubt. Synchronous observations provided a wealth of material; we found the zone of bora origin - the center of the island, the region of its maximum strength between the Barrier of Doubts and the Russian Harbor, the region of its attenuation - ten to twenty kilometers from the coast. We collected many local signs to predict it, and sometimes learned to intuitively sense its approach. But that's all. We also could not give a reliable forecast. The only, albeit weak, consolation is, perhaps, a curious fact: Dixon weather forecasters, who receive weather information not only from all over the Arctic, but from all over the world in general, are also unable to provide a guaranteed forecast. "Your Russian Harbor gives interesting information, but, unfortunately, we don’t always take them into account: this polar station is very anomalous, the winds there are too stormy...”

The coastal fast ice breathes spasmodically. Wind and waves break it and carry giant pieces of ice into the Barents Sea. You can’t hear the roar of collapsing and capsizing icebergs; everything is drowned out by the roar and squeal of the snowstorm, the whistling of antennas, and the machine-gun shots of pebbles hitting the walls. Any notion that you live in a century famous for its scientific and technological achievements is disappearing into oblivion. You are helpless and pathetic. You can master space brilliantly, but you cannot cope with an ordinary earthly hurricane. This is it, the thrice praised and four times cursed Arctic Element, magnificent and disastrous!

Three

Ermolaev, Velken and Petersen spent a whole week in a hastily cut hole in the ice. Instead of a ceiling beam, they put a spare propeller from a snowmobile on top, and threw a blanket over it, leaving only a narrow hole through which they occasionally went “outside” for meteorological observations. They slept, chatted a lot, reminisced. In the mornings, they prepared a light breakfast on the primus - there was nothing “heavy” to prepare from: the trip was designed for one day, and no emergency, emergency supplies could last for seven days. And they didn’t know how many such days lay ahead. More and more often they now remembered Nansen’s wise phrase: “Patience is the highest virtue of a polar explorer!”

Finally the weather improved and seemed to settle down. They crawled out of cover and did not see the snowmobile. Diffuse, scattered light conceals the shadows, the snow veil before the eyes seems to be a perfectly flat surface, deep dips and high bulges disappear, merging into a white plain (this is why landing planes on the snow-ice drift fields of the Arctic and the glaciers of Antarctica is so risky). The travelers did not immediately realize that the gigantic white snowdrift that had grown up next to their shelter was the Tu-5 snowmobile. They dug out the snow, cleaned the parts of the lifeless, numb engine, warmed up the carburetor on the primus stove, started the engine, drove a few hundred meters and stood up, buried in sastrugi, hard as marble, polar sand dunes, half a meter or more high: they always form after a strong snowstorm. A rough calculation showed that it would not be possible to overcome the endless field of these frozen waves - the entire remainder of the six-fold reserve of fuel was gobbled up by the unimaginable ice route. It was exactly halfway to Cape Zhelaniya. More than a hundred kilometers.

Discussion on the topic “What to do?” was short-lived - there were radio tubes in their backpacks. So, walk to the northeast. For experienced polar explorers, this is a completely doable, although not easy, task. One thing is bad: there are almost no products. Well, this also has its advantage - you will have to carry less load on yourself.

March came, a fairly bright month, but brutally cold at those icy heights. Both day and night the temperature dropped to minus thirty-five, minus forty... They walked, dancing from the cold, and the most intricate steps were performed by the champion of the Duchy of Hanover in continuous dancing. Kurt had a particularly difficult time during overnight stays: his prohibitively tall stature and long, albeit graceful, legs hampered him - they did not want to fit into the cramped ice pits in which they had to camp for the night. “We tried to get comfortable,” says Mikhail Mikhailovich. “They put our only blanket at the bottom of the hole, Volodya Petersen and I wrapped ourselves more tightly in fur coats, and put our legs under each other’s armpits. Then they tied this living structure with a rope so that it would not collapse. One bad thing: we had to turn over on command, so as not to accidentally “turn around” in different directions.”

Ermolaev and Petersen carried a pole on their shoulders, on which hung a bag with all their supplies, including radio tubes. A little behind walked Kurt Welken, who was recklessly entrusted with a can of four liters of gasoline for the primus. He started by tripping and spilling exactly half of it. But overall, the first day of walking was successful: they covered twenty-five kilometers. In the next two days, the same amount remained behind. However, by the end of the third day, it became clear that Kurt was starting to fall behind.

This would not have been so bad, but Dr. Welken began to lose heart. More and more often he asked his companions to leave him and quickly go to Cape Zhelaniya for the rescue party. But was it really possible to leave a person alone in the very center of a lifeless glacier, among the chaos of cracks hidden under thin snow? No rescue party would ever find him here. The only thing that could be done was to rush with all our waning strength to the seashore in order to build a temporary home for Kurt in some conspicuous place, and go for help ourselves. However, it was too early to turn off the ice sheet towards the shore; it was necessary to go as far as possible to the northeast, to get out of the ice labyrinths onto a more or less flat space.

The day came when Dr. Welken refused to go any further. They had just descended with incredible difficulties to the bottom of a deep and terrible valley with sloping, wind-polished icy sides. It was a gloomy, steep-walled corridor that crossed the entire Novaya Zemlya, or rather its Northern Island, from west to east. “It was an ice valley about ten kilometers wide, and the height of its sides was at least three hundred meters. If there were no sastrugi on these smooth slopes, we would never have gone down. And when we came down, we were seized with horror... We had seen severe hurricanes, only a few days ago we experienced another forest, cursed the snow waves left by it. But here in front of us there were other waves, cut not from snow, but from pure glacier ice! One can imagine what the force of the wind must have been in this eerie valley, with what energy the myriads of snowflakes and grains of sand rushing at breakneck speed cut the ice! If such a hurricane were to hit us now, we would be blown into the Barents Sea. It was urgent to get out of this trap.”

It was then that Dr. Welken said: “Basta...”

He sat down on the ice and announced that - that’s it, he’s had enough! He cannot go further, and he does not advise others: anyway, they will not be able to climb the opposite slope. They tried to persuade him for a long time, begged him, tried to “tap his foot” - nothing helped. Kurt kept repeating his message: “Leave me alone...” In the end, Ermolaev uttered several phrases, the meaning of which boiled down to the following:

- It’s not customary for us. We can either all come, or we can all not come. We won't leave you alone until we're sure you're safe. If you remain stubborn, we will all have to stay here and probably die. So get up and let's go. And don’t pester us anymore - you’ll still come with us. We will help you.

Not even five years have passed since those tragic days when the expedition of Umberto Nobile, and sailors and pilots, perished in the ice north of Spitsbergen different countries the world rushed to save her. Three people - the Italians Zappi and Mariano and the Swede Malmgren - also found themselves in a very difficult situation, among the drifting ice, without much hope of salvation. Malmgren also had a broken arm when the airship fell onto the ice. However, they had a sufficient amount of food, they did not suffer much from the cold - it was summer, albeit a polar one. And yet two abandoned the third!

How this happened, probably no one will ever know. Did Malmgren himself persuade his companions to leave him, feeling that he was a burden to them? Or did they abandon the weakened, sick man? Or maybe the worst thing happened - they killed and ate? There was a lot of talk about this in those days. The Italians themselves categorically denied this. Professor Samoilovich in his book also rejects this. But one way or another, two abandoned the third and survived. And Malmgren died... In March 1933, on the lifeless ice sheet of Novaya Zemlya, Dr. Kurt Welken probably wondered more than once: what would his two Soviet companions do with him?

Ermolaev and Petersen lifted Velken and led him by the arms. They walked across the entire valley, along steps carved into the ice, threaded a rope under his arms, and dragged him onto a three-hundred-meter ledge. Two half-dead people, holding hands and dragging, persuading and begging, led the third, half-dead, to Cape Zhelaniya. At a rest stop, they grabbed a can of gasoline and discovered that they had left it at the site of Dr. Welken’s last “strike.” It would be madness to return, and now they had to travel without a drop of water: it was no longer possible to melt the snow on the primus stove. From now on, they could only suck on pieces of ice and snow, which inflamed their thirst even more.

To top it all off, Kurt began to talk. Pointing his hand to the west, where in moonlight sparkled ice lakes on the distant Barents Sea shore, he suddenly announced that it would be nice to go get some water. In response to Ermolaev’s reasonable remark that there was no way for them to reach the water, and that the two-meter ice on the lake could not be broken, Welken glanced blankly at his companions and muttered:

- What if there is Narzan there?...

For the fifth day now they had been truly starving. They only had one chocolate bar left. The broken legs were bleeding, the frostbitten hands, cheeks, and lips had lost sensation. Ermolaev and Petersen were no longer able to carry a two-meter giant, although very emaciated. But they had now moved quite far to the north, reached the gentle slope of the ice sheet and could turn sharply to the right, to the shore of the Kara Sea, where it would be easy to find shelter for Kurt. This, however, lengthened the journey by thirty kilometers, but there was no way out. Two more painful passages - and they came to the shore of the Beautiful Bay, discovered in the 16th century by Barents himself. From here it was the last forty kilometers to Cape Zhelaniya.

Lying on the frozen coastal pebbles, Kurt Welken watched indifferently as his comrades built a small hut from snow, stones and driftwood - logs and planks brought by waves thousands of kilometers from the mainland shore. They laid him on a log floor, wrapped him in fur coats, and covered the entrance with a blanket, their only blanket, which served them both as a bed and as “central heating.” They gave Kurt the rest of the chocolate and, after some hesitation, the only revolver with six charges. At parting, Mikhail Mikhailovich briefly said to Kurt: “Don’t you dare do anything stupid!” You will be saved. We gave you everything. Please remember us. It won't be fair if you use a weapon for other purposes...

Last steps

Two people walked slowly along the shore. The path was blocked by a glacier. There was no longer any strength to get around him. We decided to take a chance and move along the steep cliff of the glacier front straight along sea ​​ice, thin and fragile. They saw a bear trail and at first were happy: since the animal passed here and did not fall through, they too would pass. But they immediately remembered Kurt: what if a bear comes across the hut?! They didn’t think about themselves at that moment. They didn’t have weapons, but still there were two of them, it’s unlikely that a bear would dare to attack them... But Kurt, even though he had a revolver...

At the end of a bright March day, they saw the Orange Islands on the distant horizon. Behind them lay Cape Zhelaniya. Now they were possessed by three thoughts: to get there, to send help to Velken, to drink tea.

The sense of time disappeared. At some point, they suddenly saw a light ahead and doomedly decided that they both began to hallucinate, like the ill-fated Narzan. But very soon it became clear that they were indeed approaching the station. “The moon went down,” recalls Mikhail Mikhailovich, “it became completely dark, and suddenly, right in front of us, the house shone with all its windows. Shadows moved behind the glass, the people were fifty, no, twenty steps away, and we stood, unable to move. A meteorologist came out of the house to make observations. Apparently he mistook us for bears and screamed loudly. I was so confused that I couldn’t find anything better to ask:

- Excuse me, is this not Cape Desire? In response there was a cry:

- God! Has Russian Harbor really come? But you died two weeks ago!”

Ermolaev and Petersen were sitting in the house and drinking tea. Glasses, dozens of glasses. They were not allowed to eat - they had been starving for too long. An hour later, a group of “wannabes” came out to pick up Dr. Welken. They were guided by a map sketched by Mikhail Mikhailovich a few moments before he fell into a fitful twenty-four-hour sleep...

The third day passed, and the rescue squad did not return. Radiograms came from the German embassy in Moscow with approximately the following content: “Inform immediately under what circumstances Doctor Welken was abandoned in the Arctic desert.” Having not yet recovered from the shocks of the last two weeks, Ermolaev, together with one of the polar station employees, went out in the direction of Krasivoy Bay. Having walked about twenty kilometers, they saw a line of people coming towards them. In the center stood a unique, lanky figure. Kurt walked on his own, carefully making sure to maintain a uniform speed. (“He ordered to walk ten kilometers on the first day, fifteen on the second.”)

It was not in vain that Ermolaev and Petersen were worried about their abandoned comrade - the bear actually visited a lonely hut on the shore of Krasivoy Bay. Soon after his comrades left, Welken heard the crunching of snow. The blanket “curtain” slowly parted, and a white muzzle with black dots on the eyes and nose appeared in the opening.

Kurt fired a revolver at the bear six times in a row, and the wounded animal rushed to run away (a few days later he was finished off by the winter workers near the very houses of the polar station), and Dr. Welken, completely shocked by what had happened, leaned back in exhaustion on the log bunk, clutching an empty revolver in his hand. It was in this condition that rescuers found him. Fortunately, the shock quickly passed, and soon the cheerful Kurt was able to independently move to Cape Zhelaniya.

On March 10, 1933, all three were together again, in the warmth and comfort of the northernmost Novaya Zemlya polar station. A week later, the icebreaker Krasin left Murmansk on a rescue voyage. Regular stable radio contact was maintained with him - the radio tubes from Russian Harbor arrived on time.

"Krasin" delivered long-awaited products to Novaya Zemlya, visited several fishing camps and on April 5 reached Cape Zhelaniya, for the first time in the history of polar expeditions reaching the northern tip of the island in winter.

On it, Ermolaev’s group went “home” to Russian Harbor - the International Polar Year continued.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Ermolaev has visited the formidable ice sheet of Novaya Zemlya more than once. Together with his expedition comrades, he used a dog sled to reach the snowmobile abandoned on the glacier, put it in order and continued his unique exploration of the North Island.

In the fall of 1933, the expedition returned to the mainland.

By decree of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Mikhail Mikhailovich Ermolaev was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor for organizing assistance to Novaya Zemlya industrialists. He had just turned twenty-eight years old.

And Kurt Welken was exactly the same age. But Hitler was already ruling in Germany, and, as soon as he set foot on the land of the Fatherland, Dr. Welken ended up in a concentration camp: he was not forgiven for his stay in the Soviet Union, his close friendship with the “Reds”. The friendship was indeed close and touching. During the short months of his life in the USSR, Welken became very attached to his new friends. He could not help but be deeply impressed by the courage and self-sacrifice shown by Ermolaev and Petersen, the mutual assistance of our sailors, pilots and scientists, and the scope of polar research. He really wanted to stay in our country forever. The Nazis could not forgive him for this. He survived miraculously, managed to escape from the concentration camp, emigrated to South America and eventually settled in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires, where he headed a large geophysical observatory.

Almost the entire subsequent life of Mikhail Mikhailovich Ermolaev was spent in the Far North. He searched for (and found!) minerals on the same Novaya Zemlya, participated in the most famous high-latitude sea expeditions, studied (the first of the Soviet geologists) the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, drifted and wintered in the ice when the icebreaking steamers “Sadko”, “ Sedov" and "Malygin", laid the route of the Vorkuta railway with his own hands.

He traveled, swam, flew, more than once found himself in emergency and fatal situations, experienced a lot, suffered, but remained the same noble and kind person as he always was.

When he was sixty-five years old, after a forty-year break, he went to his beloved New Siberian Islands and took a group of geography students with him.

However, isn’t New Earth the most beloved?

I ask this question meticulously, I am a little offended for Russian Harbor, because “the land with which you froze together cannot be stopped loving forever”!

Mikhail Mikhailovich is silent and smiles slyly. And what can he say if suddenly, unexpectedly for everyone (I suppose, and for his own large family) he left Leningrad (of course, his most beloved!) and moved to Kaliningrad, to the recently born university. “They offered me the department of ocean geography, excellent laboratories, and conditions for long-distance sea expeditions. Don’t miss out on your happiness!”

It’s a strange thing: listening to tapes with the voice of Mikhail Mikhailovich, re-reading the recordings of conversations with him, seeing with my own eyes the Russian Harbor, where we both - although we were separated by a quarter of a century - experienced so much, I always felt an inexplicable feeling of some kind of incompleteness. Intuition suggested that there was, could not help but be, in his spectacular and dramatic campaign to Cape Zhelaniya, a touch unknown to me that would sum it all up, sum it all up.

Associations came to mind every now and then, the fates of the great polar explorers doomed to death, their last actions, last thoughts were remembered.

Lieutenant Greeley's expedition in Arctic America is dying of starvation. Of the twenty-six, seven survived. The boss himself can barely stand on his feet. And suddenly - an entry in the diary: “The barometer crashed... and this is a big failure, because I hoped that the observations would continue until the last of us died.”

Two weeks later, the head of the dying, but continuing observation expedition shoots one of the soldiers for stealing seal boots from a comrade - the unfortunate man wanted to secretly eat a piece of boiled skin.

Having reached the South Pole, the English expedition of Captain Robert Scott returns to its base on the coast.

There are eight hundred miles to go, but all five are doomed. They were broken by bad luck: they came to the Pole second, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen was one month ahead of them.

Five Englishmen will surely die. And they die two and a half months after reaching the Pole, just eleven miles from a life-saving warehouse with provisions and fuel. Eight months later, their bodies are found by expedition comrades who went out to search. The diaries of the chief are also found, the incredible diaries of Captain Scott with the last entry: “For God’s sake, do not leave our loved ones”...

Next to the dead is a sleigh with luggage. Among the items are thirty-five pounds of geological samples collected deep in Antarctica, near the terrible Beardmore Glacier. Scott's men did not part with this collection until the end, "even when death stared them in the face, although they knew that these samples greatly increased the weight of the load that they had to drag behind them."

One day I met a professor of mathematics, Leon Semenovich Freiman, now deceased. In 1932-1933, he wintered at Cape Zhelaniya, worked on explosions there and was among those who were the first to meet Ermolaev and Petersen. Leon Semenovich listened carefully to my stories about Ermolaev, whom he had not seen for several decades, and said:

“I think you don’t mention one detail.” Why don’t you want to write about what they were doing when they walked from Krasivoy Bay to us, to Cape Zhelaniya? Don't you know? And Mikhail Mikhailovich never told you about this? So: they counted the steps. Yes, all forty-odd kilometers while we wandered along the shore of Novaya Zemlya, to the last meter. Ermolaev had a law: if you find yourself in an unfamiliar area, count your steps, measure the angles for landmarks. Reliable cards - and unreliable ones too! — there weren’t any at that time, and he created his own. And then, one might say, dying, he made no exception either for himself or for his suffering companion Volodya Petersen...

The voyage diaries are kept daily by Natalya Avdonina, Ph.D. Sc., Associate Professor of the Department of Journalism, Advertising and Public Relations of NArFU named after M.V. Lomonosov.

Information about the location of the vessel "Professor Molchanov" can be obtained at.

In the high-latitude Arctic, all terrestrial flora and fauna are distributed unevenly. Most of the space we moved through was lifeless. Any flower, any bird is perceived as an exception rather than a rule.

Ninth day of the expedition. There has been no internet since the evening of Saturday, July 14th. We live outside of time and space. Yesterday, unnoticed by everyone, turned into today. We approached Russian Harbor Bay at 21.35.

- “Alter Ego”. "Professor Molchanov." Tell us the location and number of people. What are your problems?

- “Professor Molchanov.” 10 people on board. Everything is fine. Let's go to you.

On line 16, our ship received a distress signal from the yacht “Alter Ego”. When she approached “Professor Molchanov,” our expedition group was already heading towards Lake Retovskoye. They went to Russian Harbor to wait out the bad weather. The clock says two in the morning.

We rode to land in six boats. The crew of “nerds,” as we were called on the bridge, were the last to depart. On the first one, rangers and geologists left to check the station for the presence of polar bears that could be waiting for us in the destroyed buildings.

Three field teams worked onshore to collect geological and biological samples and marine debris. A group led by Anna Vesman selected garbage within a perimeter of one hundred meters from the shore, in order to then sort it and identify the main sources of pollution. Fishing nets, small household items - all this is washed up by the wave and remains lying on the abandoned shores of the Russian Harbor, awaiting the next expedition.

We were given the go-ahead to prepare for disembarkation at about one in the morning, when almost all the other groups returned to the ship. The Zodiac shook every now and then as we descended into the boat. The coastal water of the Barents Sea has an incredible aquamarine hue due to low salinity.

We set foot on the rocky soil of Russian Harbor, which, according to observations in the 1970s, was an Arctic desert. Now this land is more like tundra, as Dmitry Nikitin, a graduate student, said fourth year training at the Faculty of Soil Science, Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov.

We made our first stop near a shallow river. Andrei Przhiboro, a senior researcher at the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, set up insect traps and began walking around with a net, squatting down every five minutes to remove mosquitoes from it. Andrei Aleksandrovich explained that he does not count the number of samples collected, but the points where these samples were taken. At the same time, he collects coastal and bottom substrates, from which he then extracts insects or other invertebrates, including larvae, and grows them in laboratory conditions in the collected soil. Andrei Aleksandrovich will wash each such bucket for several hours and immerse it in salt water so that the insects float up.

“It’s interesting to conduct research on adaptation, to see how insects, for example, withstand such cold conditions and what they eat. In the future, we need to ask questions: who lives, where and how long. Now I am raising these questions, but developments are needed on specific points in order to draw serious conclusions,” said Andrei Przhiboro.

Dmitry Nikitin began the first soil excavations. He looked for areas of the landscape with characteristic relief and vegetation. “The soil is a mirror of the landscape, which reflects all the biological and geological processes that have occurred over the past several hundred and tens of thousands of years,” said Dmitry.

Dima excavated the ground in four different places, described the surrounding landscape, plant communities and soil horizons. From each point he took samples for chemical, physical and microbiological analyses. The most important thing is the last one, testing for microbes. More or less comprehensive studies of Novaya Zemlya were carried out in the 1970s, but since that time the climate has changed significantly, which necessarily affected flora, microbes and soil composition. “At least it should have been,” Dmitry added. And it is microbes that quickly respond to environmental changes. It takes hundreds of years for tropical forests to turn into desert or savanna, but the microbial community can change in a matter of months. Microbes are environmental bioindicators that can be used to determine the level of soil contamination, for example, with heavy metals.

“We will conduct a comprehensive study and try to connect several indicators with vegetation and relief elements, thus obtaining a global picture of the terrestrial ecosystems of at least a small piece of Novaya Zemlya,” Dmitry said.

We walked a few more kilometers and stopped on a hill. While most of them were getting sandwiches, Dima Nikitin began to dig up soil horizons, and Sergei Kholod, Doctor of Biological Sciences and head of the Laboratory of Geography and Cartography of Vegetation at the Botanical Institute named after V. L. Komarov, examined the plants. The vegetation in Russian Harbor is richer in species composition, and an interesting find for Sergei Serafimovich was dryad, or partridge grass, as it is popularly called. This grass forms carpets on the western and southwestern slopes. Several plants that Sergei Kholod found are absent from Cape Zhelaniya: otstrolozhechnik and mytnik. Some others still need to be studied and precisely defined. “A small route of three hours cannot be called a complete survey of the territory; it is only an exploratory preliminary excursion,” said Sergei Serafimovich, “which in general terms made it possible to outline points for future descriptions.” Sergei Kholod plans to return to Russian Harbor later to carry out long-term systematic work.

The study of vegetation is interesting because it allows us to identify the dependence of vegetation on environmental factors - plants are sensitive to changes in the chemical composition of soils. Sergei Serafimovich gave the example of stemless gum, which forms cushions necessary for life in dry areas. In Russian Harbor, the researcher noticed the death of pillows, which may be a sign of unfavorable conditions, but what conditions these are is a question for further scientific research. Of course, it is impossible to accurately say about climate change in a few decades; it takes a hundred years or more. For example, it can be assumed that the influence of the sea is increasing, that is, more salts are introduced, and plants cannot adapt to the fact that the soil becomes salty. As a result, the plant dies.

From time to time we found deer bones. 14-15 years ago, on almost all the islands of the Russian Arctic, warming occurred in the fall, and ice formed, because of which the reindeer could not break through the ice crust and died of starvation. This is also an anomaly that has yet to be studied.

A team led by Nikolai Matushkin, a senior researcher at the Laboratory of Geodynamics and Paleomagnetism of the Central and Eastern Arctic, and an associate professor at the Department of General and Regional Geology at Novosibirsk State University, selected 23 core samples. Not all layers are suitable for drilling, only monolithic ones. In each layer, researchers need to drill 10-12 cores. It takes from one to two hours to reach one point. As Nikolay said, he and one colleague had a record - they accelerated to 40 minutes, but the rocks for this should be easy to drill. Rock cores contain magnetic minerals; geologists are only interested in iron and titanium oxides. Particles of these minerals, settling, are oriented towards the cardinal points. The place where Vasily Bragin, a researcher at NSU, drilled is the same sea that we are walking through now, only several hundred million years ago, when an ancient magnetic field existed on earth. Since then, a piece of continental crust has traveled, tilted, and now the direction laid down hundreds of millions of years ago does not correspond to the modern magnetic field. If geologists manage to build a model of continental movement, this will be another argument in the geopolitical discussion about how the shelf works. “The results that we have been receiving since 2003 are already being used by a special UN commission to substantiate Russia’s position on shelf expansion. From a scientific point of view, this is interesting, because it is possible to identify blocks of the earth’s crust that were considered part of one continent, but we can prove that this is a separate small continent,” Nikolai said.

Andrei Przhiboro said that the first expedition to Russian Harbor to study insects was organized in 1837 by Karl von Behr. Almost every subsequent expedition here ended in death. For me, Russian Harbor will remain an unsociable, cold-blooded, merciless place that you need to visit at least once in your life in order to forget about the omnipotence of man.

Reference

The NArFU project “Arctic Floating University” is an innovative project that combines science and education. The NArFU expedition project is aimed at obtaining new knowledge about the state and changes in the Arctic environment in order to implement recommendations for ensuring the sustainable development of the region and preserving its ecosystem in the context of global climate change. The organizer of the project is Northern Federal University named after M.V. Lomonosov together with the Federal State Budgetary Institution Northern Administration for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring. The project consists of conducting marine integrated scientific and educational expeditions in the Arctic region, with the participation of leading researchers and students of Northern (Archive) Federal University and with the involvement of specialists from all over the world.

The innovation of the Arctic Floating University project lies in the integration of educational and research processes. During expeditions, students and graduate students of NArFU are intensively immersed in the scientific and educational process, studying fundamental natural science and humanities disciplines, acquiring the skills and abilities to conduct practical work and laboratory research based on modern methods of analyzing statistical, mathematical, cartographic, GIS information, as well as field scientific research in expeditionary conditions.

Expeditions are carried out on the research vessel “Professor Molchanov”, owned by the Federal State Budgetary Institution “Northern UGMS”. The vessel complies with international environmental and safety standards, allowing it to perform long, expeditionary voyages in Arctic conditions.