An underwater tunnel for the Nord Stream pipeline has been laid under the legendary Neva River.

Gazprom will need more than 60 new specialized ships, 23 LNG tankers and more than ten drilling rigs by year 2020, the company’s deputy leader highlighted in a meeting with subsidiary companies yesterday. A number of contracts will be signed with Russian shipyards in the course of the year, the company confirms.

An Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment, conducted by the Arctic Council, has recommended that that all northern countries, including the United States, agree to follow mandatory rules when it comes to constructing ships that will travel through the Arctic Ocean. It is believed that the Arctic is on its way to becoming a major throughway for commercial shipping, as the ice in the area continues to melt.

The company RusHydro plans the construction of a new wind power park in the Ura Guba bay, next to the Kislogubskaya tide power plant and the strategically important Vidyaeva nuclear submarine base.

The Norwegian Sea is about the develop into Norway’s new gas province. This month StatoilHydro made another finding in the area.

Just mere hours after the National Academy of Sciences recommended that more than a thousand intelligence images of Arctic ice be released for general viewing, the Interior Department made those pictures available. The Academy made the recommendation that the images be released in order to help scientists and researchers further study and understand the impact of climate change on the Arctic at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) Wednesday and by that afternoon the images were available for viewing.

In his meetings with German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday, President Dmitry Medvedev praised Finland for its positive assessment of the Nord Stream pipeline project, and called on skeptical Sweden to take a similar position.

According to independent scientists travelling on a Greenpeace ship in the Arctic, an ice island in the region is on the verge of breaking off from the largest ice glacier located in the northern hemisphere. It is said that the island, once it breaks off, will weigh several million tones. In fact, the researchers say that there will be, altogether, 5 billion tones of ice separating and crumbling from the Petermann Glacier, located on the north-west coast of Greenland.

The Russian Arctic research vessel “Mikhail Somov” today sails off from Arkhangelsk heading towards 40 remote Russian Arctic research stations.

The Naryan-Mar Commercial Sea Port is for sale. The port will be sold in an open auction, the Russian Federal Agency of State Property confirms.