Permafrost of the east Siberian Arctic shelf and coastal lowlands

In the past decade, within the framework of joint Russian-German marine and terrestrial studies on the Arctic shelf, New Siberian Islands, and coastal lowlands of the Laptev and East Siberian seas, fundamentally new data have been obtained on terrestrial and offshore permafrost in this area. Field and laboratory investigations supplemented with numerical modeling and generalization of the results of numerous geological surveys, exploratory works, and scientific researches performed in previous years have made it possible to revise existing knowledge about the distribution, thickness, physical state, and history of development of terrestrial and offshore permafrost in the East Siberian part of the Arctic. The main results of these studies and their interpretation are discussed in this paper.