December 11, 2019

MPI’ s Station in Magadan Celebrates Its 30th Anniversary

December 11, 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the MPI’s North-Eastern Permafrost Station in Magadan. The history of the City of Magadan and Magadan Province is inseparably connected to gold mining. From the early stages of mining in the 1930s, permafrost presented many challenges for miners and builders. The immediate, vital tasks were to design reliable road embankments and building foundations on ice-rich permafrost, to develop effective methods for stripping of frozen overburden, and to find adequate construction approaches for dams on permafrost foundations. This was the period of trial and error. In 1948, a National Institute of Gold and Rare Metals (VNII-1) was established in Magadan, with its geocryology department focusing specifically on permafrost studies. This department conducted a wide range of research devoted toward finding effective solutions to permafrost-related problems for the mining and building industries in the Magadan Province. With the establishment of VNII-1, later reorganized into the North-Eastern Complex Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, achievements of the Magadan researchers gained wide recognition both in the country and abroad. During Perestroika, the Geocryology Department at VNII-1 was closed down. Academician Pavel Melnikov, then director of the Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk, proposed to organize, within the Institute, a station in Magadan. In 1989, a north-eastern department of the Permafrost Institute was established under the direction of Dr. Georgy Perlstein, which was renamed the North-Eastern Permafrost Station in 2004. Over the last 30 years, the Station research staff, while small in number, has continued fundamental permafrost studies in the Magadan region and provided a research service for about 50 firms and companies facing permafrost-related problems. Long-term collaboration is sustained with many of them.