About Mikhail Grigoriev

Mikhail Grigoriev was born on August 23, 1955 in Yakutsk, into a family of permafrost scientists. In 1964, he moved with his parents to Moscow where he entered the Moscow State University after high school and Army service. With a Master’s degree in geomorphology, Mikhail returned to Yakutsk where he joined the Permafrost Institute. In the more than thirty years since then, he has had many accomplishments in permafrost research, including the development of protocols to mitigate impacts of placer mining in northern Yakutia and the elaboration of geomorphology-based principles for monitoring of urban infrastructure on permafrost. He guided activities to produce the first GIS-based database of geocryological, geological and dynamic parameters for the nearshore areas of the Laptev, East Siberian, and Chukchi seas.

Mikhail Grigoriev is currently Vice Director for Science at the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk. He also serves as director of the Arctic Center at the Trofimuk Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics in Novosibirsk, which includes the new Samoylov station in the Lena Delta. Seven years ago, Mikhail was awarded a Doctor of Science degree. He published 4 monographs and 342 papers, including 86 papers in international journals.

In recent years, Mikhail has been conducting field and analytical investigations to study the distribution and evolution of subsea permafrost in the Arctic shelf. To address this inadequately known research topic, he carried out several drilling campaigns and obtained unique data on the structure, morphology, age, temperature regime, and chemistry of subsea permafrost. He determined the average slopes and degradation rates of nearshore permafrost.

Mikhail participated in more than forty Arctic expeditions, twenty three of which were undertaken under his leadership. Over the last fifteen years, he has been a research coordinator of the Russian-German joint programs in the eastern Russian Arctic, including the Lena expeditions conducted as part of the Laptev Sea System Project. He has been actively involved in several international Arctic research projects, such as the Arctic Coastal Dynamics multi-national program. He is now a member of the Russian National Committee for the Climate and Cryosphere Project (CliC), the Russian Governmental Commission on Arctic Development’s Working Group on Education and Research Promotion, the FANO Scientific Coordination Council’s Working Group on Arctic Research, the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Scientific Council on the World Ocean, and the IASC Action Group on Geosciences.