by Mikhail ALEKSEEV, Dr. Sc. (Geol. & Mineral.), Chief Researcher at the Geological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Valentina DRUSHCHITS, Cand. Sc. (Geogr.), Senior Researcher at the same Institute Large-scale search is on all over the world for natural resources in sea-shelf areas. Our country is no exception either: by the close of the 20th century we had discovered oil, gas and placer deposits in seas of the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. A large body of materials collected on this part of Eurasia has facilitated the exploration work there. Many works by our scientists and field experts show it abundantly clear that exploration of sea shelves in Russia's North and Far East is of immense scientific, economic and ecological significance.* The total area of our economic zone there is above 6,000,000 km2 . Nearly all of it lies in typical sea-shelf areas where major hydrocarbon deposits have been discovered and feasibility studies carried out into the geology and geophysics of field work, alongside exploratory parametric drilling and data evaluation toward detection of placer formations. The idea of compiling the atlas "Geology and Mineral Resources of the Russian Shelf Areas" was suggested way back in the early 1980s by the Shelf Working Group of the Commission on World Ocean Problems (Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences). To begin with, it decided to update the materials on Eurasia's continental shelves. For years and years our expeditions working in coastal and sea-water areas had been amassing this body of information. By the end of the 12th century they had collected vast data arrays both in this country and abroad on the structure and stratigraphy of shelf areas, and on the composition of sediments there. After long and circumstantial discussions the Shelf Working Group under Dr. M. N. Alekseev proposed the idea that this immense volume of data should be systematized in the form of a paleographic atlas. This idea won support from Yuri ... Читать далее