September 4, 2017


MPI and SKLFSE Joint Activities in Summer 2017

Following the establishment of the International Research Center for Asian Cold Regions Environment and Engineering, which was officially opened in April 2017, the co-founders - the State Key Laboratory of Frozen Soil Engineering (SKLFSE), Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Melnikov Permafrost Institute, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences (MPI) - conducted a range of joint activities during the summer of 2017. Six young scientists from MPI stayed for a month at SKLFSE in Lanzhou for training and discussions. Together with their potential research partners, they visited field sites on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and took part in experimental work. Dr. Alexey Galanin and Dr. Ivan Khristoforov were invited to SKLFSE as visiting scholars under the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs (SAFEA) program. A team from SKLFSE, including Profs. Wu Qingbai, Ma Wei, Jin Huijun and Zhang Ze, and from MPI, including Dr. Mikhail Zhelezniak, Andrey Litovko and Leonid Gagarin, conducted a field trip from Yakutsk to Tynda along the Lena Federal Road and the Nizhny Bestyakh–Tynda Railroad to examine the problem sections over ice-rich permafrost in Central Yakutia. The active interaction and idea sharing resulted in four joint project proposals submitted to the RFBR-NNSF Call 2018. If approved, the first joint studies will focus on the effects of zonal and azonal factors on thermokarst, Middle and Late Pleistocene paleoenvironments inferred from syngenetic ice-rich permafrost studies in Asia, permafrost issues of the Lena River bridge site near Yakutsk, and the influence of precipitation infiltration and water vapor condensation on the ground thermal regime.

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