Clean Arctic volunteers plan cleanup mission near White Sea Petroglyphs

PETROZAVODSK, October 6. /TASS/. The Clean Arctic project’s volunteers will clean the eco-trail near the White Sea Petroglyphs and will remove a years-old landfill in Karelia’s Letnerechinsky village, the regional government said on Tuesday. "At the first location the team will clean the eco-trail leading to the petroglyphs, and will remove the brushwood," the government said. "Another location is Letnerechensky, where the team jointly with the local residents will remove the years-old landfill." Clean Arctic will finish the mission in Karelia on October 12. The team features volunteers from across the country. A new team of volunteers will head for a mission in the Murmansk Region, the organizers said. The team has come to Karelia after a cleanup in Komi. From two locations there the volunteers have removed about 230 tonnes of waste. Another team has been working for more than a month on the Yuzhny Island (the Novaya Zemlya Archipelago). Karelia’s petroglyphs, a form of primitive monumental rock art, are images created by removing a part of rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading. The White Sea group - Besovy Sledki - of 470 figures was discovered in 1926. Later on, a few more hundred images were discovered next to that group. Another big group of petroglyphs is on Lake Onega’s eastern shore - it has more than 1,200 drawings. On July 28, the 44th UNESCO World Heritage Committee session chaired by China unanimously decided to inscribe Russia’s Petroglyphs of Lake Onega and the White Sea on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The Clean Arctic project’s authors are Captain of the 50 Let Pobedy nuclear-powered Arctic class icebreaker Dmitry Lobusov and Gennady Antokhin, Captain on FESCO’s ships from 1982 to 2012. In early June, Captain Lobuzov suggested organizing a "big Arctic cleanup," hoping the joint effort would clean the Arctic territories from accumulated scrap metal and fuel. The program, presented at the Public Chamber on July 5, has been widely supported, including by the president’s ecology envoy Sergey Ivanov, the nature watchdog Rosprirodnadzor, volunteer and public organizations, scientific community and by the Arctic regions’ governors. Photo by Denis Kozhevnikov/TASS Read more