Geophysical methods of ensuring technological sovereignty and national security of Russia in the Arctic

Abstract

The article discusses the achievements and problems of geological exploration in the Arctic offshore areas. The authors of the article obtained fundamentally new knowledge about the prospects for oil and gas content of the sedimentary cover and heterogeneous basement, as well as gas saturation in the free and hydrated states in the upper part of sedimentary deposits. A complex of new technologies has been developed, including 4D seismic exploration in near real time conditions. For the first time, seismic refraction data were used to map the distribution of frozen and thawed ground on the shelf of the seas of Eastern Siberia. A fundamentally new justification has been given for the gas-dynamic genesis of the formation of giant craters in the Arctic, which implies the formation of gas-saturated cavities in the masses of ground ice under the influence of endogenous processes. According to remote Yamal Peninsula, as well as coastal parts of the Kara Sea, 6022 zones of intense (explosive) degassing with the formation of craters (pockmarks) were revealed. For the first time, according to RS data from space, large mud-volcanic edifices with pronounced craters were discovered at the bottom of the Arctic thermokarst lakes. Causes and consequences of catastrophic man-made gas blowouts and self-ignition during drilling of exploratory wells at a number of fields in the Arctic were investigated.