LAUSR

For more than 20 years, the Murmansk Marine Biological Institute, Kola Scientific Center, Russian Academy of Sciences, jointly with the Southern Scientific Center, Russian Academy of Sciences, has been carrying out research in Russia’s Arctic Seas, including research aboard nuclear-powered icebreakers [1–3]. In August 2017, the author headed a scientific group on a high-latitude expedition aboard the nuclear-powered icebreaker 50 Let Pobedy. The polar expedition was devoted to the 40th anniversary of the first conquest of the North Pole by the nuclear-powered vessel Arktika. The 2017 expedition repeated the route of the 1977 one (Fig. 1). The main aim of the research was to assess the influence of natural and anthropogenic factors on the state of ecosystems in the high-latitude Arctic.