On World Wildlife Fund assignment, the crew will make synchronous bio-acoustic monitoring of gray whales in their Piltun Bay grazing grounds, now endangered by large-scale drilling works on a transnational development project of shelf oil- and gasfields, said the press center of the Maritime University. The program over, the ship will go on to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
The crew has brought together researchers from Vladivostok, Moscow and Tomsk.
The Nadezhda is hosting a summer Sea University for post- and senior undergraduate students from all over the Russian east. They will study Far Eastern seas-excellent training for the budding environment monitoring experts they are. A pioneer effort to blend college and academic research, the university curricula envisage practical research, conferences, and lectures by top-notch scientists.
The ship carried a first Sea University in August 1997.
