Inventory of the lands of Western Yakutia disturbed by geological exploration according to remote sensing data

Western Yakutia is famous for its mineral wealth. It is difficult to overestimate the role of exploration geologists of different generations who have contributed to its study. Today the diamond mining and oil and gas industries are developing most intensively in Western Yakutia. The extraction of minerals is preceded by the regional, prospecting and exploration stages of geological exploration. At the same time, the modern system of environmental regulation used in assessing the impact of geological exploration on the environment is insufficient and imperfect, especially for large-scale exploration for oil and gas. It is required to develop special environmental standards for environmental impact during the implementation of geological projects, taking into account various geographic, climatic and mining and geological conditions, based on the study of environmental and geochemical factors and assessment of the stability of landscape components of a particular territory to man-made impact. For the territory of Western Yakutia, studies were carried out to assess the geoecological safety of geological exploration. A register of disturbed sites was compiled; the areas of lands disturbed due to geological exploration were identified and calculated. The adaptation of the high-resolution satellite imagery interpretation technique for small-scale linear objects was carried out. The scale of geological prospecting technogenesis was revealed, which has a significant regional scale, while it has the prospect of spreading to the entire territory of Western Yakutia, including the shelf of the Laptev Sea. It will be hundreds of thousands of kilometers of clearings, a million square kilometers transformed into a network of geophysical profiles about 10 m wide. It should be noted that the consequences of such technogenesis are not known today, how the cryolithozone and the underground and surface hydrosphere will react, what will be the reaction of gas hydrates trapped in the bowels? Such a scale of work today can already influence the climatic processes of a regional scale, it is possible that they are to some extent to blame for the dry years following one after another in Central Yakutia. The work performed allows us to understand the scale of antropogenic impact, to look for ways to solve it, to form green exploration for the protection of our environment.

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