编号 11 (2022)

Shipping in the Arctic is a very crucial component of the economic sustainability of the major national projects in this region. The presence of ice on the Northern Sea Route, the main transport corridor of the Arctic, creates significant obstacles even to modern ships with increased power and an ice-clearing hull shape. The article describes traditional approaches of the ice navigation management based on using of icebreakers and modern technologies for improvement of the ship icebreaking and ice-resistance abilities. We also discuss the problems of icebreaking escorting of actively built in the last decade large-size vessels and the necessity of development of new tactics for joint operation of vessels and icebreakers. The studies of the movement of large cargo vessels in narrow ice channels either with or without the icebreaker escorting create the prerequisites for improving the maritime transport system in the Arctic. The prospects for the development of Arctic shipping based on the increased speed of ships in ice conditions are determined.

The structure of a large number of silicate minerals is based on three-layer blocks consisting of two T-radicals of vertex-connected silicon-oxygen tetra-hedra and an O-radical of edge-connected octahedra between them. Three-layer blocks are of different lengths — from infinite two-dimensional (micas) to infinite one-dimensional (pyroxenes, pyroxenoids, and amphiboles). The crystal-chemical diversity of these minerals results from the variations in the chemical composition of the blocks, their geometric characteristics, and topology and symmetry of their location in the structure. Such diversity covers the wide range of structures, from layered (and pseudo-layered) to the frame ones. Hybrid structures combining two-dimensional fragments of different widths with one-dimensional ones are formed under specific crystallization conditions. The study of these minerals opens the potential for the synthesis of layered and pseudo-layered microporous compounds with desired properties.

We present some fragments from the forthcoming book “Academician A.A.Borissiak and his family in Saint-Petersburg, Petrograd, and Leningrad”, written by I.V.Bodylevskaya and based on the correspondence of family members. This is a story about the beginning of the scientific activity of the academician, about his family and daily rounds of a scientist at the end of the XIX century.

“May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard” — the first known sentence in Canaanite alphabetical script (66). Earth’s first known mass extinction happened 550 million years ago (67). Blue whales may consume up to 40 kg of microplastics a day (68).