News in Press-centre

Ice Mechanics International School will be held at Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) from January 29 to February 9. Fifty three students and young scientists from China, the Republic of Korea, Japan and Canada will take part in Ice Mechanics Winter School, the unique ice research project in Russia.

According to Egor Pomnikov, head of the Ice Research Laboratory at the FEFU School of Engineering, the fourth FEFU Ice Mechanics School will be a record in terms of the number of participants. Young researchers will come to study ice on Russky Island almost twice as many as in previous years. They are looking forward for lectures by the best university experts and invited speakers, workshops at an open testing ground of 50,000 m², and hundreds of field and laboratory experiments with sea ice.

A three-day cycle of lectures with immersion in the ice topic will open the school. Students will learn about the physics and properties of sea ice; its impact on offshore structures: platforms, pipelines, and ships; features of the development of oil and gas fields on the shelf of the freezing seas.

On February 1, young scientists will go out on the ice of Novik Bay in Russky Island. They will have to take more than 800 ice samples for laboratory work, as well as to conduct tests directly at the testing ground: evaluate the structure, heterogeneity and strength of natural material, the direction of growth and size of ice crystals and other parameters.

“This year we plan to spend much more time on the testing ground and have prepared some new experiments for the participants. For example, for the first time we will determine the strength of ice for crushing with the help of the latest domestic equipment. Also, we have never measured the load capacity of the ice cover before. All this is necessary for serious research: modeling ice destruction processes in the design of marine engineering structures, Arctic including,” explained Egor Pomnikov.

The Ice Mechanics Schools have been held at the university from 2015 as part of the FEFU International Arctic R&D Center's activities. The project is aimed to create a center of excellence in the field of Arctic technologies for the development of the resources of the World Ocean, full engineering and scientific support of projects on the shelf of the Arctic and Subarctic Seas.